


new rules

by kafkian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Asgardians - Freeform, Conflict Resolution, Everyone Thinks They're Together, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Humor, M/M, Misunderstandings, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Rebuilding, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Sharing a Bed, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-13 03:12:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13561515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkian/pseuds/kafkian
Summary: ‘Oh good, more excellent ideas from Thor,’ Loki sighs with a total and complete lack of enthusiasm. ‘Can’t I just push Heimdall down the stairs or something?’‘How is that a good deed?’ Thor asks, bewildered.‘It would give everyone a good laugh,’ Loki says, the corner of his mouth twitching. ‘I’m laughing on the inside just picturing it.’---In which Loki is roped into cleaning up his act to reassure the people that he isn't planning on betraying them (again), while Thor spends far too much time explaining that no, they aren’t sleeping together.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I loved Thor Ragnarok SO MUCH that my brain just would not stop shouting about it. Two months later, this is the end result. Thank you to Clo for remaining excited about the prospect of me finishing it even when I was half-convinced I wouldn't, and for telling me it sounded good. Shout out to Dua Lipa for the title (if you haven't already listened to the Initial Talk remix then do yourself a favour, honest to God). 
> 
> This story is complete and will be explicit in later chapters. Next chapter should be up in a couple of days, when I've finished editing it. 
> 
> Thanks to Taika Waititi for my life.

‘You can’t just ignore it all the way there,’ Loki points out in his most ostentatiously reasonable tone, crossing his arms over his chest as he watches Thor unlace his boots. ‘We need to at least come up with a plan for when the Midgardians decide to throw me to the wolves.’

‘We already have a plan,’ Thor reminds him, shooting him a wide smile as he looks up. Loki rolls his eyes. ‘Besides, I thought you liked wolves.’

‘I like them when they’re not trying to dismember me,’ Loki responds sourly. ‘And dazzling the puny mortals with your new lightning abilities is _not_ a plan.’

Thor sighs and hangs his head briefly before he pulls off his boots. His muscles are weary from days without sleep, dashing from one end of the ship to the other overseeing the construction of dormitories and living spaces, organising supplies, cataloguing what’s been lost and what needs to be found. He keeps a number in his head all the time now, three figures: the tired few that make up the nation of Asgard. He’s so proud that they got here at all he could burst, but every new problem brings with it a reminder that Thor had given up the throne once before, even if it was to his thrice-damned, silver-tongued snake of a brother, and he isn’t sure how much he’d really wanted it back.

Also, his eye socket itches, and if Loki had given him the courtesy of five minutes alone before following him to his quarters after dinner, he would have been able to scratch it by now.

‘Then what would you have me do, brother?’ he asks, a little more seriously. He pauses in his undressing and leans sideways against the wooden beam of the bedframe. He can’t summon the energy to do much but gaze up at Loki, who looks a little startled at his sudden acquiescence but recovers quickly.

‘We should approach them on good terms, first,’ he begins, the scheming glint in his eye growing sharper by the second. ‘Greet them graciously, and offer them something they need. We must be careful not to imply remorse for past actions. We don’t want them to think they can just demand whatever they want of us in recompense.’

‘You slaughtered hundreds of their number last time we were on Earth and now we return in spades, begging for refuge,’ Thor reminds him flatly. ‘They can demand whatever they like.’

Loki’s eyes narrow.

‘And if they demand revenge?’ Loki snaps. ‘If your loving mortals demand my head on a spike, brother?’

Thor can’t help an incredulous snort at that, even as it makes Loki’s hands clench into fists as he launches off the wall with an angry jerk. Thor catches his wrist at the last second and holds him there but Loki refuses to look at him. Thor bites his lip, his mouth twitching with the effort not to smile. His head on a spike! Of all Loki’s melodramatically improbable fancies, that might be Thor’s favourite.

Thor contemplates him for a moment, almost too tired to envision the mental gymnastics Loki must have had to go through in order to reach the conclusion that Thor would happily hand him over to people who wished his death. What must it be like to have Loki’s brain? To be so quick to take offense that not even a lifetime of adoration could reassure you: to remain convinced, always, that you must not be wanted where you are.

‘Then we will go somewhere else,’ Thor says calmly, stroking his thumb over Loki’s exposed wrist. His pulse jumps and scatters, although Loki keeps his breathing carefully controlled. ‘There are other planets, brother. An entire galaxy of them, I hear.’

Loki’s eyes flicker to him and then away, the corner of his mouth twitching unwillingly. Thor takes it in, holds it, keeps it. It’s been a long time since Loki felt free enough in his presence to let himself smile truly and not as part of a trick, even if he still attempts to keep it hidden.

‘And you think the people would be content with such a bargain?’ Loki murmurs, raising an eyebrow. He leans back against the wall and Thor lets go of his wrist with a final squeeze.

‘Perhaps I would not couch it in such mercenary terms,’ Thor frowns, stretching his arms out before him and groaning at the fuzzy relief. The double-edged language of state functions rolls through his head, the sly formality that always slipped more easily from Loki’s mouth than his. ‘I would say that they take all of us or none of us. What have we left but our loyalty to each other, the sanctity of our state?’

Loki lets loose a low, mocking whistle and Thor swats at his hip. Loki dodges out of reach, the smile full stretched across his mouth now, teeth glinting.

‘Oh, so you _have_ been paying attention,’ he grins, keeping tauntingly out of Thor’s reach. ‘We’ll make a king out of you yet, brother.’

‘I don’t need any tips from you on that score,’ Thor snorts, standing up and pulling off his cloak, unfastening the straps of his jerkin. Loki grins and leans his head against the wall, examining his nails with the kind of studied insouciance that led Thor to pick him up and dunk him in lakes when they were children, just to see him squawk in surprise.

‘Sorry, remind me again – out of the two of us, who got to be king first?’

‘Only because you were impersonating Father!’ Thor objects.

‘The method by which I arrived at the throne is of no consequence,’ Loki dismisses. ‘You’re just annoyed you didn’t get there first.’

‘I would have,’ Thor complains. ‘If you weren’t such a slippery, conniving little –’

‘Beloved brother?’ Loki finishes, widening his eyes sweetly.

‘Probably going a bit far,’ Thor says, pulling off his jerkin and making short work of his trousers, leaving them in a pile next to the bed while Loki watches. He clambers beneath the covers in only his underwear and his eyes are already closing against his will, heavy with exhaustion. ‘Now get in or get out, I don’t care which, just make sure you turn out the light.’

‘Is that bed even big enough for two people?’ he hears Loki ask sceptically before a short pause, the soft clicking of the light switch, and then a sharp poke to the spine.

‘Move over, then,’ Loki mutters irritably in response to Thor’s surprised noise. ‘Only you would invite someone to share your bed and then protest when they require you to make room for them.’

‘I wasn’t _inviting you to share my bed_ ,’ Thor mimics sleepily. ‘You’re here, I’m here, bed’s here. Time for sleep. Just made sense.’

‘Does it?’ Loki asks under his breath, and then, sharply: ‘Did you even remember to take your eyepatch off? You know you’ll be sore in the morning if you don’t let it –’

‘Shut up, Loki.’

Thor’s body remembers, even if he wouldn’t have known to admit it, just how Loki likes to be held, and so while Loki is still rummaging and sighing, throwing pieces of leather armour out of the bed and sending tendrils of sly magic out to drift along the seams of Thor’s eyepatch and test the limits of his patience, he turns over and lays an arm firmly across Loki’s middle, pulling him backwards with a sigh. Loki goes still under him and then Thor can almost _feel_ him decide not to go, and as tired as he is, as murky as this memory will be tomorrow, it makes something almost childishly happy light up in his chest.

‘Oh, alright,’ Loki mutters, relaxing minutely with the very definition of bad grace. ‘You’ll only sulk tomorrow otherwise.’

Thor makes a humming noise of assent and falls asleep with Loki’s slowly moving chest under his palm.

\---

It doesn’t seem like such a clever idea the next morning when Thor is woken by the distant sound of someone hammering on the door.

‘Apologies, your majesty,’ a voice calls. ‘But there’s been a –’

‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ Thor pulls his mouth away from the pillow to yell before slumping back down with a groan. Loki makes a hissing noise somewhere close by and Thor reaches out a hand to clumsily pet the nearest part of him in apology, which is either an elbow or a weird, bony part of his shoulder.

Thor sighs, rolling over and getting a face full of Loki’s tangled hair. It smells like honey. What the devil has Loki been using on it? Without much to trade or money to buy, they’re restricted to rationing soap that’s barely suitable for use on the hardened skin of soldiers, never mind Asgardian royalty, but he should have known Loki would have weaved a way around that for the sake of keeping up perfumed appearances. He pushes his nose obstinately into the side of Loki’s neck and fastens his arm around his waist again, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Maybe if he just stays here for a while, the problem will go away on its own. Or at least will not be so loud.

‘No,’ Loki says flatly.

‘No what?’ Thor mumbles, refusing to open his eyes until Loki starts struggling out of his grip.

‘No to – to _everything_ ,’ Loki says in what sounds like abject despair, before heaving a huge sigh and sitting bolt upright. He gives an irritable twitch of his hand and his armour appears from nothing, flowing carefully and quickly over his body like quicksilver as he runs a hand over his hair and smooths it as one would with a brush. He throws Thor a quick glance over his shoulder and blinks.

‘What?’ he asks warily.

‘And you say you’re not a witch,’ Thor teases, stretching, head pillowed on his arms. Loki’s eyes dance over every exposed part of Thor, his gaze critical and heated with annoyance.

‘You say you’re not an idiot,’ Loki snipes, clicking his fingers and grinning triumphantly when Thor gasps at the sensation of cold water plunging over his body although the sheets remain dry. He splutters, holding up his arms and seeing no droplets.

Loki’s smile has softened slightly when he looks up. Every hair is perfectly in place; no one could have known he was sleeping less than five minutes before. Thor feels the irrational desire to yank him back down and mess up his hair again, just to prove it really happened. 

‘It looks like magic to you because you don’t understand it,’ Loki tells him, standing up and heading for the door. ‘But really it’s just science. Any of your precious mortals could tell you that.’

‘Nope, I’m pretty sure it’s magic,’ Thor calls to his retreating back.

Loki ignores him, murmuring a good morning to whoever is waiting outside the door and slipping past quietly without even a backward glance. Thor sighs and gets out of bed.

‘What are we looking at?’ he asks Heimdall when he arrives on Level B, just outside the western dormitories. They’ve constructed a kind of rudimentary living space meant for recreation, bolstering communal connections: there are scattered throws and blankets seating elders, and children playing in small groups while their mothers and fathers talk quietly. Loki had been the one who pointed out that it was going to take at least a year for them to get to earth, and if the people had nowhere to gather and relax in the meantime, Thor was going to have a mutiny on his hands before they got a quarter of the way. Thor privately wondered if Loki had made this point just so that Thor would categorise maintenance of the grapevines on level C as top priority, but it gave people something to _do_ as well as actually producing wine at the end, so he’d let it go.

The boy who was sent to rouse him flashes Thor the same wide-eyed, vaguely judgmental look he’s been giving him the whole way here. Thor couldn’t get a word out of him: when he’d emerged from his quarters, the lad only shook his head and started off at a pace designed not to permit much conversation, leaving Thor completely mystified.

‘If my task is complete, Lord Heimdall,’ the messenger asks stiffly, and Heimdall waves a hand. The lad gives Thor a microscopic bow of acknowledgement and shoots off at the speed of someone bursting with either illicit knowledge or a severe need to visit the bathroom.

Heimdall raises an eyebrow.

‘Damned if I know,’ Thor shrugs. ‘What’s going on? I’ve got office hours at nine.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call it that,’ Heimdall mutters. ‘No one knows what it means but you.’

‘You know what it means now,’ Thor grins, clapping Heimdall on the back. ‘And ‘two hours every day when I sit on the throne and listen to people complain about their neighbours’ is too long.’

That was a little unfair; they didn’t _always_ complain. But the ship was fairly small for an entire nation of people, even if they were now a severely diminished nation, and everyone was crammed into such close quarters than squabbles were breaking out on every level, regardless of how well supplied or tended. The people of Asgard had lived in a land of luxurious plenty, and they weren’t used to being told that they had used up their hot water ration for the day before they’d even had time to wash their hair.

‘House Arnar has given insult to House Magnus again,’ Heimdall tells him grimly.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Thor sighs. ‘What’s that, the third time this week?’

Heimdall gives a slight nod.

‘What did they do now?’

‘The youngest Magnusson was discovered desecrating the Arnar house crest, at which point the eldest Arnarsson chose to take offence. By headbutting him.’

‘Do I want to know how he was desecrating it?’

‘I don’t think so, your majesty.’

‘Can’t leave them alone for five minutes,’ Thor mutters, and then dashes off in short order once he spots the troublemakers in question: Leif Arnarson just breaking out of the hold a nervous guard had on his arms and launching himself at Einarr Magnusson, who had been glaring so hatefully it was a wonder the air between them didn’t catch on fire. Einarr still had the black eye from when Leif had last got at him, throwing himself over the table when they’d seated themselves within earshot of each other at dinner two days ago. Thor is starting to think they might be doing it on purpose, out of sheer restlessness. Whatever it is, the bruises aren’t stopping Einarr’s lip curling in insolent invitation.

Thor heaves an internal sigh and swoops in between them to neatly pick Einarr up around the waist, holding him just out of reach of the other boy. Leif halts within a bare inch of Thor’s chest, but only just, his eyes darting past to glare at Einarr. Thor raises an eyebrow and Leif scowls, cheeks flushing as his hands bunch into fists at his sides.

‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’ Thor asks him, trying to emulate the kindly but firm tone his minders had taken when he had fought with Loki as a child.

Of course, it hadn’t worked back then, either.

‘His brother killed my brother,’ Leif shouts in his face. Thor blinks and Einarr makes an angry noise, which dies out with a squeak when Thor tightens his arm absentmindedly around his waist.

‘I remember, you told me last week,’ Thor says mildly. ‘We’ve had this conversation six times. Doesn’t that seem like too many for a boy of nearly eighteen?’

‘He deserves it,’ Leif says in a lower voice, one that crawls with hate. He won’t take his eyes off Einarr’s face. For the first time, Thor feels a stirring of uneasiness. He’s been relegating this particular grievance to the stress and strain of relocation, the lurching dread of not knowing what a new world would bring. But Leif doesn’t look mindlessly angry or afraid: he’s got a target, whether or not it’s just for convenience’s sake. If Thor wasn’t holding Einarr away from him, Leif would already be upon him again, and until he can be made to forget that desire, the situation will not change. 

‘That is not for you to decide,’ Thor says sternly, and is caught off guard when Leif snorts. ‘What? You think you could decide better, do you?’

‘Better than _you,_ ’ Leif retorts, finally looking back at Thor and paling slightly when Thor raises an eyebrow.

‘Yes,’ Thor says, gesturing to the entire situation. ‘Because that’s been going so well for you so far.’

Leif’s mouth tightens and he pointedly doesn’t say anything.

Thor sighs and sets down Einarr, who is red with humiliation by this point, and holds his hand out to keep Leif at arm’s length, even as the boy narrows his eyes and readies himself to launch again.

‘For the love of Odin, calm down,’ Thor snaps, and then sighs. He was this young once, he was this eager to prove himself. He has to be patient.

He tries again.

‘Whatever is between you, it must be settled. We are too few in number to squabble among ourselves – think of your love for Asgard, for your mothers. Surely they don’t wish to lose more sons to a blood feud that began before they were even born.’

It had been like that between a few of the oldest families, back on Asgard: disagreements that went so far back no one could even remember the source, men that had never spoken but spat at each other in the street. In general, Odin hadn’t been tolerant of feuds which muddied his warriors’ sense of loyalty to one another, but in the most extreme of cases it usually got worked out in the midst of battle anyway: either they killed each other or came home as tightly bound as brothers. Thor had never known two families to fight quite like Houses Arnar and Magnus, though; to hear his nursemaid tell it, _that_ particular feud had sprang into existence with the first tentative unfurling of Yggdrasil’s roots.

But they don’t have room for that now. They can’t have learned nothing from Hela, from what she showed them about Asgard’s past – they can be more than bitterness, and fighting, and senseless slaughter. They have to be.

‘This must be an end to it,’ he says shortly, looking between the two of them before he turns to Leif. ‘It’s terrible that you lost your brother and I’m sorry for it, but fighting with Einarr isn’t going to bring him back, and he wouldn’t want you to waste your time. Get over it.’

Leif doesn’t look at him but his lips thin with irritation. Einarr crosses his arms over his chest, staring down at the ground. Thor restrains the urge to roll his eyes.

‘Not all of us had brothers like _yours,’_ Leif says after a tense minute, betraying the complete lack of self-preservation that Thor has suspected for some time. ‘My brother was honourable and strong, not like that snake you call –’

‘I’m the only one who gets to call him a snake,’ Thor interrupts, irritated. He resists the urge to fold his arms defensively across his chest, very aware of Heimdall and the guards standing only a few feet away, as well as the small family groups that have been watching the altercation unfold like it’s a primetime spectator sport. He continues hastily: ‘By which I mean, Loki is a prince of Asgard and you will treat him with the respect he deserves.’

There is a perfect, judgmental silence. One of the guards coughs delicately.

‘Anyway, this is all beside the point,’ Thor declares, deciding that he will drag them back to the point by any means necessary. He gestures to the guards, who quickly pry themselves off the wall and pretend like they weren’t smirking and enjoying the show. They’re all currently suffering from a stunning lack of professionalism on account of how they were all promoted from ‘farmhand’ to ‘royal guard’ about a week ago: the entire palace guard had fallen to Hela’s sword as well as the army, and frankly Thor had had to make do with what was left. At least they seem to have figured out how to pull their swords from their sheathes without cutting themselves now. ‘We’ll have to put you on different levels until I’ve decided what’s to be done.’

‘Ground-breaking strategy,’ Einarr mutters as they’re led away in opposite directions. ‘Really original.’

Thor stares after him in betrayal: he’d seemed like the one with slightly more sense than a bilgesnipe.

‘They’re not going to stop of their own accord,’ he predicts once he and Heimdall are alone. Thor could almost respect Leif’s bull-headed attitude if he hadn’t known how that kind of thing usually ended. It was so easy, when you were that young and headstrong and proud, to feel every slight as if it were a permanent wound upon your honour, and to decide that restoring it was the most important thing: to let the pursuit of that honour poison you and hold you back, and make you less than you could be.

Thor also knew that it was hard to admit at the end of it all that that was all just a bunch of stupid words and that you’d been an idiot, and needed your head soaking.

‘You do not think separating them will accomplish your goal?’ Heimdall asks.

‘That’s only going to stop them so long as they wish to be stopped, and Leif in particular has let this consume him, you can see it. I think Einarr is only reacting to him, he’s got no grievance of his own.’

‘I am inclined to agree.’ Heimdall hesitates before he speaks. ‘I am not prone to meddle in the lives of those I see, but I would have this bloody contract come to an end. I have seen a hundred men fall under its influence; there are less than a dozen members left to either of those families.’

‘I remember watching Ragnar Magnusson put out Njal Arnarsson’s eye in a pub brawl when I was twelve,’ Thor muses. ‘I think I cheered him on.’

Heimdall snorts.

‘Time makes fools of us all,’ he says.

‘Pretty sure it doesn’t make a fool of you,’ Thor says, looking at him sideways. He checks the time and swears. ‘I really have to run, but – Heimdall.’

Heimdall’s eyebrows raise in question.

‘If we can bring them together before one of them kills the other,’ Thor says earnestly, ‘then it will serve as an example. The people dearly need a reminder of what makes Asgard great, after what they’ve just been through.’

‘A noble plan,’ Heimdall says, smiling slightly, and Thor allows himself to feel a moment of reassurance that he might not be doing the worst possible job. ‘How do you propose to do that, exactly?’

‘Let me get back to you on that one,’ Thor mutters, and claps Heimdall on the back before he runs off to perform his duties.

\---

‘It’s all very well for you to say they need to make up, but would you, in their position?’ Loki asks him later. He’s lounging on Thor’s bed picking from a small bowl of dried fruit and nuts, throwing them one by one into the air and catching them in his mouth. It’s hypnotising; Thor lost five minutes watching him do it before he remembered he came in here to change. ‘If someone killed me?’

‘Is that really a fair comparison?’ Thor asks, flinging a set of throwing knives across the room irritably in search of a missing boot. ‘I think if someone went after you with a hatchet the way Einarr’s went after Leif’s, odds are good you deserved it, and anyway you’d leave them without the motor skills or probably the appendages necessary to try it again.’ He takes a deep breath and restrains the urge to scratch the hell out of the healing skin under his eyepatch. ‘Also, if you’re _going_ to leave all your stuff here, why don’t you just use the drawer I left empty for you rather than just leaving it all on the floor? I tripped over your stupid cape this morning and nearly took my other eye out.’

‘I think you just answered your own question there,’ Loki says dryly.

‘Of course! How could I forget,’ Thor returns, making a triumphant noise as he finally locates the other boot. ‘Your favourite pastime after stabbing me: watching me trip over your possessions.’

‘You’re just so _good_ at it,’ Loki says, so earnestly that Thor turns to look at him. He tries for a valiant second to be angry but can’t manage it in the face of Loki stretched out on his bed, unrepentantly mussing up the sheets with his delicately arching feet and smirking at him as if he knows exactly what Thor is thinking. Which is odd, because for that single suspended moment, Thor isn’t at all sure of what he’s thinking, or what he’s going to do next.

‘What would you do?’ he asks after a minute, out of sheer curiosity. ‘If someone killed me?’

‘I’m surprised you’re even admitting such a thing might be possible. Aren’t you supposed to be a god or something?’

‘Humour me,’ Thor says, rolling his eyes. ‘God or not. What would you do?’

‘I’d tear the skin from them in strips while they still lived, and force them to eat every scrap,’ Loki says calmly, then blinks at the expression on Thor’s face. ‘Sorry, was I supposed to lie?’

‘That’s … very specific,’ Thor says blankly.

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think it over,’ Loki points out. ‘When I was incarcerated, and so forth.’

‘Which time?’ Thor asks as innocently as he can, and catches it between his teeth when Loki throws a raisin at him. He grins as he chews and Loki pokes out his tongue, for a second looking all of twelve years old. ‘Also, weren’t you in prison for trying to kill me at least one of those times?’

His voice is teasing but he regrets the words almost immediately for the way Loki’s hands tighten around his bowl. This is coming too close to the things they still don’t talk about – that honestly Thor doesn’t think they _need_ to talk about, because everything is different since Loki came back. He doesn’t need Loki to reassure him that Loki never really wanted him dead. Oh, Thor can believe that Loki dreamed of it, that he pinned his hopes on it, that if you excavated Loki’s body you would find that desire lodged like a splinter at the very base of his heart – but every fight they’ve ever had has ended with Loki pulling his punch at the last second. He’s had a hundred chances and blown every one, even though he is quick and clever and a hardier combatant than their storytellers give him credit for. Thor never learned to be cautious when Loki beckoned to him, because something told him he didn’t need to be. Even if Loki were not carefully avoiding his eyes now, Thor would have recognised the truth in that.

‘A habit I grew out of,’ Loki says after a long moment, his mouth twitching slightly. His eyes flicker to Thor’s soft grin and then away with a small frown, but he doesn’t look ready to spring up off the bed anymore either.

‘Perhaps House Arnar and Magnus will overcome their quarrel yet, then,’ Thor says warmly, and Loki snorts, looking much more like himself.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it. The warriors of Asgard aren’t exactly known for their forgiving natures.’

‘No, but we _are_ known for our loyalty to the kingdom, and right now the kingdom comprises of about five hundred people hurtling through space at ten thousand light years an hour in a metal box, so I’ll be damned if I let two idiots who haven’t even finished puberty yet bring it down from the inside,’ Thor says, all in a rush. He pulls in a deep breath, frowning.

Loki stares at him for a surprised second before he starts to sit up and gets lazy halfway, propping himself up on his elbows. He’s so bony Thor’s surprised he doesn’t poke himself in the eye with his own shoulder.

‘I think they call that overidentifying, back on Midgard,’ he tells Thor with faux-sympathy. His eyes are glittering with amusement. ‘I saw it on the television.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Thor snaps. He sits down hard on the edge of the bed and Loki doesn’t bother to move an inch, letting his knees poke Thor in the back. He even draws one of them up so he can do it more effectively. Thor reaches behind him and grabs Loki by the thigh to keep him still, his thumb scratching against the warm leather. Loki makes a disgruntled noise but doesn’t move. ‘What do you know about conflict resolution?’

‘That’s not what you need here,’ Loki says confidently, lying back again, his hair spreading across the pillow. Thor lets go of his leg and twists around to stare uncomprehendingly at the brief arch of Loki’s back as he settles back into place. He’s not sure how Loki always ends up taking up so much space in here when it’s _Thor’s room,_ but it’s probably something to do with how Loki is usually already in here when Thor gets in. Does he ever actually spend any time in his own room?

‘Oh no?’

Loki grins at him so sharply that a spark jolts through Thor’s entire body: the thrill of one of Loki’s sinuous, wicked plans gliding into motion.

‘Nope. What you need is good old-fashioned manipulation. And as it happens, I –’

‘Think yourself an excellent teacher, yes, yes,’ Thor interrupts, shoving Loki’s legs over so he can sit on the bed properly and reach over to steal an almond from Loki’s seemingly never-ending bowl. ‘So go on,’ he says, grinning as Loki scowls, ‘what exactly would you recommend?’

\---

‘Tell me again how this isn’t conflict resolution,’ Thor says. Loki spelled them invisible so they can watch his experiment unfold from a nearby corner without worrying about prying eyes, but Thor is less worried about that than Einarr and Leif getting through the day without killing themselves or each other, to be honest.

They watch the two boys struggle to walk in a straight line across the dining hall, their hands looped firmly behind each other’s backs and held in place by magic. They’re covered in bruises from falling down midway through previous attempts, which Thor had felt guilty about right up until the moment in the second attempt when Leif had started trying to scratch Einarr’s eyes out with his one free hand, yelling out curses of pain and rage as he did so.

‘Because we’re not making them talk about it,’ Loki explains, watching as Leif deliberately sticks out a foot in front of Einarr and they both go tumbling to the floor, already wrestling and scratching at each other. The woman walking behind them elaborately rolls her eyes and kicks them until they roll out of the way. ‘We’re just humiliating them in public until they decide to get along in order to make it stop.’

‘That’s definitely on the tyrannical end of the manipulation scale,’ he murmurs, just to see Loki twitch out of the corner of his eye. ‘Making them feel each other’s pain is a particularly gruesome touch.’

‘And it’s going to work,’ Loki says with relish. ‘Look, they’re already stopping.’

Thor doesn’t believe him, but when he turns, Loki’s right: Einarr and Leif are already lying back in a heap on the floor, chests heaving. Einarr’s lips are moving furiously in some rant they stand too far away to hear. Leif doesn’t exactly look happy but he isn’t springing back on top of Einarr immediately either, which is more progress than they’d made in the last hour.

‘Can you,’ Thor starts, but quiets when Loki puts his hand on Thor’s arm gently, a finger flickering to his lips: _yes_. Loki starts to smile, his eyes sharp with concentration as he pulls the words towards himself, and after a second he laughs delightedly.

‘Excellent,’ he says, grinning at Thor as he squeezes his arm. Thor blinks at him, struck by the ridiculous thought that this is the first time he can remember Loki reaching for him rather than the other way round since they came onto the ship. Longer than that, even – Loki has not reached for Thor first in _years,_ and now his long fingers curl as casually around Thor’s wrist as if they don’t go a day without embracing. As if Loki might touch Thor anytime he likes.

Thor’s next words come out stuttering and oddly breathless.

‘What – ah. What do you hear, brother?’

‘They’re insulting us,’ Loki grins, too wrapped up in eavesdropping to notice Thor’s distraction. ‘Extensively and creatively. Oh, the things they’d do if they weren’t stuck together, the havoc they’d wreak, the punishments they intend to rain down upon us, blah blah blah –’

‘And inciting two of my subjects to hate me is good how, exactly?’

‘Don’t you see, brother?’ Loki turns his body into Thor, lowering his voice but still watching with satisfaction as Leif actually snorts with laughter at something Einarr says. Thor tries to concentrate on what he’s saying, and not on how every nerve in his arm is alive and thrilling to the gentle weight of Loki’s hand. They’ve been sleeping in the same bed for more than a week now: how can this small touch leave Thor so tongue-tied? He must be overtired, or tense. The workload must be getting to him. ‘Their hate for us will bring them together! It gives them a common enemy. You can’t hate someone you spend every moment commiserating with – or rather, you can, but it softens over time into something you might begrudgingly call affection, and then it becomes difficult for you to pinpoint how you could ever have hated him without knowing too that –’

‘Where the hell are you getting all this?’ Thor interrupts, totally at sea. ‘That’s not – they’re not being _affectionate._ Not by any yardstick I’m aware of! Leif tried to pull one of Einarr’s ears off earlier, remember? He only stopped because he passed out from the pain? And then – wait,’ he pauses suspiciously, zeroing in on how Loki is stubbornly refusing to look at him. ‘Who are you really talking about?’

Loki whips round to give him a furious look, his cheeks flushed.

‘God, I don’t know,’ he says, too loudly, throwing his hands up jerkily. A couple of people close by look round, startled, at the sudden noise from an apparently empty corner. Thor sets his hands lightly on Loki’s shoulders to try and steer him away, only to pull them back with a hiss not five seconds later when Loki’s eyes flare and the leather goes smouldering hot under his palms. He winces and covers it badly, praying Loki’s voice doesn’t carry when Loki spits at him: ‘Who could I possibly be referring to, d’you think? Where might _I_ possibly have learned how very easy it is to resent one who should be a brother to you, and then again how maddeningly easy to love him, and how inextricably the two might come to be entwined over the years –’

‘Alright, alright, I take your point, you don’t need to write me another play about it,’ Thor snaps. Loki turns away from him in disgust, with a sharp gesture of the hand that gives Thor the feeling he might find an insulting picture stuck to his back later. Or perhaps a KICK ME sign.

‘The play wasn’t for you,’ Loki says irritably. ‘You were never meant to see it.’

‘Well, you were putting it on for everyone in Asgard multiple times a day for months, so perhaps you should’ve –’ Thor starts, and then notices the way Loki’s arms are crossed punishingly tight over his chest and the line of his shoulders, so taut you could bounce a coin off them. He takes a deep breath and blows it out in one long stream. He has been trying hard not to hurt Loki by mistake since they cobbled together this fragile new truce of theirs: it would be very, very stupid to do it now on purpose.

‘What I mean is, this is great,’ Thor says abruptly. ‘This was a really good idea, and I’m glad you helped me. Thank you.’

Loki stares at him. He looks around them as if checking for hidden cameras.

‘Are you ill?’ he asks, looking baffled. ‘Are we being watched?’

‘You needn’t act as if I am always so ungrateful,’ Thor says, feeling his cheeks flush. ‘I’ve thanked you for your help before, brother.’

‘Yes, and those moments have gone down in infamy as having been directly followed by one of us trying to kill the other, I believe,’ Loki reminds him warily, but at least he’s stopped looking like he’s about to stab Thor with the sharpest implement to hand to distract from how close he is to crying.

‘Should we go and help them up?’ Thor suggests after a cautious pause, not sure what else to say. Loki hadn’t kept his hand on Thor’s arm for two minutes before Thor had somehow said something to offend him. It’s difficult not to feel wary, for all the tension has been diffused a lot faster and with a lot less attempted murder than usual.

‘And undo all our good work?’ Loki scoffs. He clasps his hands behind his back and watches Leif and Einarr, who aren’t looking at each other but are still muttering feverishly, with hatred in their eyes. ‘They can work it out between themselves. It will be a bonding experience. Besides, don’t you have to go and help the engineers with that localised power failure near the greenhouses?’

‘Oh, shit,’ Thor hisses, and takes off at a run.

\---

Loki’s plan proceeds uninterrupted by anything as arbitrary as ethics or practical considerations. Thor starts to feel really bad right around the sixth day when he spots Leif and Einarr limping out of the baths, pale and still plastered together, wearing matching uncomfortable expressions.

‘Bonding experience,’ Loki reminds him lightly before Thor can even say a word, and drags him back to his quarters by his belt for a catnap before anyone else can stop him in the corridor with a question or ask a favour or simply the time of day.

‘It’s because you make yourself so _available_ to everyone all the time,’ Loki tells him when they’re back in Thor’s rooms, in a tone of voice that suggests Thor might be losing brain cells at the rate he grants attention to his subjects. Loki isn’t the one lounging about, for once: their roles are reversed, with Thor lying in bed blearily watching Loki rummaging around the room looking for something. ‘If you had a little mystery about you, they wouldn’t feel so free to assume they can just stroll up and drag a twenty-minute catch-up out of you every other day. You have to make them work for it. For _fuck’s_ sake, _where_ is my quarterstaff, I swear I left it in here somewhere –’

‘Can’t you just –’ Thor makes a little limp wavy gesture with his hand to indicate Loki should throw magic at it.

‘I have just –’ Loki makes an irritable matching gesture. ‘I think it’s stuck on something.’

He scowls down at the pile of detritus that covers their floor. That covers _Thor’s_ floor. It’s Thor’s floor, Thor’s room. Loki has his own quarters, although Thor is just now realising that he has never been there or seen any evidence that they actually exist.

Loki tuts and kicks aside something that lands with a foreboding crash. Thor reasons if it was anything important then Loki would have spelled it unbreakable in anticipation of this exact situation, and doesn’t bother to lift his head.

‘How long do you think we need to keep Leif and Einarr together?’ he asks sleepily. ‘If it goes on much longer I think they’re going to become co-dependent, and then we’ll have an entirely different set of problems.’

‘Another few days, I should think,’ Loki says. ‘Give it time to really sink in. Although they’ve been warming up to each other even faster than I had hoped.’

‘I know, they haven’t punched each other in days!’ Thor says, as enthusiastically as he can with his eyes shut and minimal movement of his facial muscles. ‘The part where they’ve started tucking their hands into each other’s back pockets is a bit undignified, but in general it sets an example about how important it is for us all to get along. I think it makes a good story, don’t you? I heard someone saying that at dinner yesterday. Two boys torn asunder by opposing family loyalties, brought together when Asgard was at its lowest. Who knows, maybe the people will even pass it down to future generations.’

The thought makes Thor smile even as his face protests. He would enjoy more stories being told about what a thoughtful and wise king he had turned out to be, instead of quite so many about all the keg stands he used to do when he was a teenager.

‘Ah, yes,’ Loki mutters. ‘Who could forget to give a shit about what the great people of Asgard think?’

Which reminds Thor that he is shortly going to be late to go and professionally give a shit about what the great people of Asgard think. 

‘I need to get up,’ Thor hears himself say, and then lies completely still and doesn’t move. ‘I’ve got – stuff to do. Things.’

‘Hmm,’ Loki murmurs dubiously. ‘Which particular thing is it now?’

‘Office hours in ten minutes,’ Thor grunts, then levers himself up with application of more effort than it took to heft Mjolnir. In a minute or so he might even manage getting out of bed.

‘Why do you call it that, anyway?’ Loki asks. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask. I can’t make sense of it. You’re not even working in an office. Of all the idiotic Midgardian terms to have picked up –’

‘It was how Jane referred to the times when her students would visit her for advice,’ Thor explains over him loudly, cracking his neck from side to side. ‘It seemed fitting.’

‘Fitting,’ Loki echoes, sounding more than a little sceptical. He bends down with a reluctant look on his face to check underneath a discarded pair of trousers, and then stops pretending any interest at all and props himself against the wall instead, asking, in a voice so casual he might as well openly state how much he cares about the answer: ‘What happened with Jane anyway?’

‘She deserved more than I could give her,’ Thor says simply. ‘More time, more attention, just – more.’ He barks out a laugh and scrubs a hand over his face, remembering the rueful look she’d given him. ‘She told me it was like being with someone who was already married, and that she cared for me deeply but couldn’t sell herself that short.’

Loki’s mouth twitches a little.

‘And who were you supposedly married to, in Jane’s imagination?’ he asks, in a carefully controlled voice.

‘Asgard, I suppose,’ Thor answers, a little nonplussed. He frowns. ‘I assumed she meant theoretically. Or perhaps she was speaking of the Avengers! I do love them dearly.’

‘I see,’ is all Loki replies, blank-faced, and then after a few minutes more quiet rustling in which Thor falls back asleep sitting up, suspiciously: ‘When’s the last time you actually slept properly? You look even dopier than usual.’

‘Yesterday,’ Thor reminds him, eye opening wide and itching in the bold light. He rubs it irritably and gestures to the bed. His eyepatch is somewhere on the bedside table and he starts groping around for it without looking. ‘You were here and everything. Bit surprised you don’t remember.’

‘You came in late and left before I woke up,’ Loki reminds him. ‘I don’t know if you even touched the sheets before you were up again.’

‘Well, I’ll be sure to touch them tonight,’ Thor says gamely, dragging himself out of bed and groaning as he stretches. He drags himself over to Loki just to see his unimpressed expression in close-up and there’s a weird moment where it seems like there’s a gap waiting to be filled – like one of them should be doing something that isn’t just staring at each other – but then the moment breaks, Loki turning back to his search with an irritated _tsk._ Thor swats him lightly on the shoulder and leaves.

‘So Loki _does_ have your ear,’ is the first thing Heimdall says to Thor when he arrives at the throne. He murmurs it in his usual softened rumble but it hits its target: Thor had been wondering when this was going to come up.

He rubs his beard and really, really wishes he’d gotten more sleep before he had to have this conversation.

‘He doesn’t have my ear,’ he protests, scratching the back of his neck and avoiding Heimdall’s eye. The waiting queue of subjects are starting to look a bit impatient, probably in part due to the gallery of spectators set up along the far wall. Korg waves at him cheerfully from his seat next to Valkyrie, who sits sprawled over a bench peeling an apple with a switchblade. She’s still maintaining after several weeks of impeccably punctual attendance that she only comes to these things ‘for a laugh’, but Thor could have spotted her interest a mile away. It makes sense, in a way; she spent a long time on the run from Asgard, and now she’s back she wants to make sure it stays in one piece.

Either that, or she really does just enjoy watching Thor make a royal idiot out of himself, pun intended. At least Korg, who is sat with a notebook in hand ready to take notes on how the monarchy is doomed to fail for his next pamphlet, pretends to pay attention even when Thor _isn’t_ tripping over his words.

Hulk is sat at Valkyrie’s feet and taps her on the knee as Thor watches, demanding an apple slice in a grumbling tone. Thor gives him ten minutes before he gets bored and stomps off somewhere to go and get played on by small children like a sentient jungle gym.

‘Loki gave you advice about Leif and Einarr, which you heeded. The people are taking notice,’ Heimdall continues serenely. There’s a glint of something sharper than simple teasing in his eye. ‘What else would you have me call it?’

Thor sighs and walks to the side, out of earshot of everyone else in this damn hall, motioning Heimdall to join him. Heimdall follows after a pause just long enough to convey his reluctance.

‘I’d say that my conversations with Loki are private and it’s not like you to butt in where you aren’t welcome,’ Thor says quietly. Heimdall doesn’t say anything or look chastised in any way, but Thor didn’t really expect him to: he kept the people safe from Hela when Thor couldn’t, and it’s a testament to his strength of character that his concern for them remains even when the responsibility no longer rests in his hands. Thor can’t think of a better system of checks and balances than Heimdall’s wary eye, especially in combination with the collective brain and brawn of Valkyrie and Hulk. ‘Loki’s advice was sound and I wouldn’t have followed it if I believed him to be acting out of malice. As little as he may be liked on this ship, Heimdall, he isn’t stupid. I’d be a fool if I didn’t at least listen when he offers me the benefit of his wisdom.’

It clearly requires a huge effort for Heimdall to keep his face blank at the idea of Loki possessing any wisdom the rest of them might want to hear.

‘And,’ Thor continues, then sighs. ‘Look, you and I both know Loki’s made mistakes. No, look, I know, I do – that’s putting it lightly, yes, alright. But he came back when he didn’t have to, Heimdall. I left him on Sakaar with no strings attached, nothing to pull him back to us, and he came anyway.’

‘Nothing except you,’ Heimdall tells him with the kind of direct look that reminds Thor yet again of how far his vision extends.

Thor spreads his hands and lets his eyes go as wide and honest as he can, although it doesn’t work quite as well with his particular stature and build. Loki had always been better at the earnest supplication thing than he had, even if he was faking it ninety five percent of the time.

‘Does it matter why, exactly? Whatever his reason, he made that choice knowing his welcome wouldn’t be warm, and he did it anyway. If it’s for me then – then _let_ it be me that keeps him on an even keel.’

Heimdall looks about two seconds away from rolling his eyes, but he looks like he might also be restraining a small grin. Thor continues, encouraged. ‘I can’t convince you that he doesn’t have mischief up his sleeve, because er, you’ve met him. But if he came back because of something I did then doesn’t that mean he wants to keep his place here? Does it matter why he wants to help, so long as he does?’

‘Loki’s help usually has an expensive price tag attached,’ Heimdall muses, at which Thor can’t help but give a small nod, even as he’s thinking that he’s happy to pay it so long as Loki will stay. ‘And he has been inconstant before.’  

‘So have I,’ Thor says immediately. ‘And look, Loki hasn’t asked me for anything since he got here. I think he just wants –’ and here he pauses for a second, because he can’t make himself give that part of Loki up to someone who doesn’t respect him, not even to assuage Heimdall’s suspicion: can’t make himself say that Loki just doesn’t want to be alone, that mostly Loki seems to want unfettered access to _him_ , and that Thor thinks for once there might not be anything more complicated than that behind Loki’s scheming. It feels like too big of a thought to even look at directly, never mind to say out loud. ‘He just wants to be part of Asgard again. He isn’t as inconstant as you think him, Heimdall. After all, neither of us are children anymore, or even stupid young fools.’ He pauses. ‘Now we’re slightly older fools.’

Heimdall actually cracks a grin at that, even if it’s only for a second. Thor seizes it with both hands, his voice going warm and persuasive.

‘The long and short of it is that he gave me good advice, Heimdall. Everyone knows he’s clever, even though he hasn’t always used it to good ends. If I can trust him to help, that will benefit everyone, and we sorely need as much help as we can get, let’s be honest.’

Heimdall’s expression wavers like a coin deciding on which side to fall, but after a moment of consideration he nods.

‘I am satisfied that you are not bent to his will to the detriment of the people,’ is all he says, with a small nod. Thor waits but nothing else is forthcoming so he smiles, a little nonplussed. He feels like he just won a race and got given the consolation prize instead of a trophy.

‘That’s great then,’ he says, clapping him on the back with a grin. ‘Glad we got that straightened out.’

‘But,’ Heimdall continues calmly, ‘I am afraid I am not the only person aboard the ship with reservations about Loki’s place here.’

‘What?’ Thor says, blindsided.

‘Your majesty,’ a woman’s voice breaks in. Thor turns to see a tall woman wearing loose trousers and a long hooded shirt, whose blonde hair was cut close to her scalp. It hurts Thor a bit to look at it. Why do people cut their hair so savagely short when they don’t have to?

She’s smiles at him expectantly, and Thor’s brain throws up a name out of nowhere.

‘Gilda,’ he says a bit too loudly, praying he’s right, and is relieved when her smile broadens. ‘Gilda, of House Raynor. Yes, I remember you well.’ He doesn’t, but she doesn’t have to know that. ‘What can we do for you today?’

Her smile fades as her eyes flick to Heimdall and back to Thor. Unease churns in Thor’s stomach. If the people are unhappy enough with Loki’s presence to threaten a dispute, he’s not sure what he’s going to do. He definitely can’t say half of what he’d just said to Heimdall to her. There are so few answers that he can diplomatically give without just making it sound like he’s letting Loki walk all over him, which seems unfair. Who’s doing the walking changes by the day.

‘You’re concerned by the presence of Loki on the ship?’ he asks kindly, going over to take his seat on the default throne. Gilda watches him silently, eyes wary. ‘I can understand such a complaint, considering Loki tricked the people in such a way, and for so long, but I can assure you –’

‘Oh, we knew it was Loki,’ Gilda says in a breezy tone of voice. Thor blinks at her, startled.

‘You … knew it was Loki,’ he repeats slowly.

Gilda looks at him as if he’s a particularly dim breed of cattle.

‘With all due respect, your majesty,’ she starts, her mouth quirking as if to suggest the actual respect due might not turn out to be a huge amount, ‘the Allfather had never before devoted so much time and effort to the theatrical arts that he forgot to conduct the annual census, or let the army fall into such sloth that they wrecked half their equipment running drills while still soused.’

Her voice is so dry by the end of her sentence that Thor has to bite his lip hard not to laugh. Gilda pauses, and then seems to give up any sense of respectful restraint as a bad job.

‘There were also quite a lot of statues and parties and such,’ she points out. ‘And he was wearing a _robe_ most of the time.’

Thor put on a face like he was pondering her words deeply but he already knew he couldn’t argue with any of that. It had taken him less than five minutes to surmise how Loki had tricked him, but he had assumed Loki might have been doing a better job of convincing the populace than his own brother. Apparently not.

He frowns.

‘If you knew, then why did you not send for help, or gather yourselves in secret and form a rebellion?’

He pauses as soon as the words are out of his mouth, wondering whether or not it was a particularly good idea to encourage his subjects to rebel against a monarch they disliked.

The amused gleam in Gilda’s eye suggests it’s nothing she hadn’t already thought of, in any case, so Thor shelves the thought for now. 

‘If I might speak plainly, your majesty,’ she says, at which Thor restrains himself from saying that she hadn’t seemed to have any trouble doing that so far. He nods.

‘It seemed unwise to argue with or attempt to overthrow a regent which we knew to have intended genocide against the people of Midgard,’ she continues smoothly, apparently oblivious to the sudden queasy feeling that comes over Thor. ‘Loki seemed harmless enough while we played along, but that was no guarantee of our safety if his plans were disturbed.’ She smiles wryly. ‘And they were not such horrible plans, after all.’

‘Harmless enough,’ Thor mutters under his breath. ‘Right.’

‘I quite liked the play, after a while,’ Gilda adds helpfully.

‘But now,’ Thor starts, stomach still turning, ‘now that Asgard is free from Loki’s rule, and safe under mine – now the people have chosen to come forward with their concerns?’

Heimdall shoots him a look out of the corner of his eye at the rise of Thor’s voice. Thor bites the inside of his cheek. He mustn’t be a king who responds belligerently to his people when they come to him with valid complaints: then they’ll stop coming to him at all, and resent him in private. That isn’t the foot on which he wants to begin his reign.

It’s just that he’s already had this conversation once today and he’d much rather go off and bash something really, really hard with his lightning than have it again, especially when he can _tell_ Valkyrie is grinning at him even when his eyes are fixed on Gilda.  

‘Now there is a sizeable contingent of the people that believes Loki is not to be trusted to remain aboard the ship, your majesty,’ Gilda tells him with admirable evenness. ‘He has done nothing but lie and cheat his way through the realm, and the Allfather himself did not trust him.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Thor says in a low voice. He realises he’s sitting forward on the throne and makes himself lean back, place his hands calmly on the softly glowing arms.

‘He was _impersonating_ the Allfather while Odin himself rotted away on Midgard,’ Gilda gets out through gritted teeth, ‘so I _think_ we might be able to assume that –’

‘Father loved Loki,’ Thor interrupts, his voice as calm as he can make it, which is possibly not very calm at all. ‘He accepted his faults, as do I. And I will not tolerate any insult given to him in my presence.’

He hears Valkyrie mutter something that sounds like ‘oh my _god’,_ although it’s difficult to tell with her hand covering her face like that. Hulk is guffawing loudly, probably at Valkyrie’s reaction rather than what Thor is actually saying, but it definitely isn’t helping the atmosphere either way.

‘Yes,’ Gilda says in clipped tones. ‘And then there is that.’

Thor frowns.

‘What do you mean by that?’

A muscle in her jaw tightens and her eyes flicker again to Heimdall.

‘It has been suggested that – it is thought that – perhaps that you yourself are not an impartial judge of whether or not Loki intends to betray us again, your majesty,’ Gilda says, clearly choosing her words very carefully.

‘You don’t think I’m impartial?’ Thor asks, blinking. ‘I transported Loki back to Asgard for war crimes myself. In _chains_.’

‘And if you might permit me to ask, your majesty – when he got free, how hard did you fight to get him back in them?’ Gilda asks silkily, one eyebrow raised. ‘I also seem to remember there was some confusion about how exactly Loki was freed in the first place.’

Thor opens his mouth and then shuts it again, restraining the urge to shift uncomfortably in his seat.

‘Quite,’ Gilda says. Then, for the first time, she looks a little uncomfortable, as if she wishes she didn’t have to say what came next. ‘But there’s also, ah.’

She gives a discreet cough and looks at Thor expectantly.

‘What?’ he asks, mystified.

Gilda hesitates.

‘Oh, hell,’ Heimdall mutters, the first words he has spoken since Gilda began her supplication. Valkyrie snorts out an incredulous laugh, and when Thor turns to look at her, a fair few of the people waiting for an audience are smirking or looking otherwise amused. It occurs to Thor that this might not have been the best place to have this conversation, and then also, as he catches at the subtle gleam of satisfaction in Gilda’s eye hiding under the discomfort, that he has underestimated her quite significantly.

‘What?’ Thor demands warily, unable to remain silent. ‘Will no one –’

‘There have been – reports,’ Gilda continues, a slightly pained note in her voice at having to spell it out, ‘that Loki shares your quarters at night, your majesty.’

‘Um,’ Thor says, and then realises he doesn’t have an excuse, because he never expected to need one. ‘Well. That’s. I mean, that’s. Not relevant here, I don’t think.’

There’s a general murmur of disbelief from the assembled crowd, along with Valkyrie’s renewed crowing. Thor grinds his teeth. He is going to _annihilate_ her in the practice ring tomorrow, he thinks, even as a voice in the back of his mind reminds him that he hasn’t managed that in two weeks of sparring and he’s unlikely to start now.

‘I mean,’ Thor rallies, scrambling for an explanation, ‘that doesn’t, we’re not –’

‘Whether or not there is any truth to the rumours,’ Gilda speaks over him, ‘the situation remains that Loki is a liability and that you, your majesty, might not be capable of reviewing the facts with a clear head. Not that we blame you, my king. After all,’ she says with such gentleness that Thor might not even have recognised it to be deadly, if he couldn’t see her face, ‘if you _could_ keep a clear head, it wouldn’t really be love, would it?’

Thor’s eyes widen with outrage as Gilda watches him silently, her lips turned up in a slight smile, her head at an angle none of the other waiting subjects can see. Thor shuts his mouth.

‘I will take your concerns under advisement,’ he says through clenched teeth.

Gilda curtseys before him gracefully and almost floats through the exit without another word, obviously incredibly pleased with herself. As well she should be: she’s leaving enough whispers in her wake to keep the rumour mill grinding until they reach earth.

Thor drifts through the rest of the hour in a haze that only lifts when every waiting supplicant has been heard. Heimdall takes his leave to do a patrol of the ship, ferreting out minor misdemeanours, and then it’s just Thor, Korg and Valkyrie sprawled across her bench. Hulk got bored and wandered off about half an hour ago, thumping and singing out of tune all the way down the corridor.

‘Well,’ Valkyrie says into the dead silence, ‘you can’t exactly blame them.’

She only shrugs unrepentantly when Thor glares at her.

‘Sorry, but it’s true. He _is_ a war criminal.’

‘I wouldn’t mind as much if I thought that’s what this was actually about,’ Thor says indignantly, ‘but the _look_ on her face – I think this is personal. Loki did something to her.’

‘What a shocker.’

‘I mean something to _her_ , not just the stuff he’s done more generally,’ Thor snaps. ‘Korg, tell me I wasn’t imagining it.’

‘Nope,’ Korg agrees. ‘Doesn’t really matter why though, does it? Everyone and their mum heard it. It’ll be all over the ship by now.’

‘Which is exactly what she wants,’ Valkyrie says thoughtfully. ‘She’s out to get Loki, and she seems to think you’re to be lumped in with him, which to be honest –’ Valkyrie casts a hand over to Thor and sighs as she waves it up and down in general resignation, ‘– welcome to the fucked up-ness. She’s got your number.’

‘I’m so lucky to have such helpful advisors,’ Thor tells her as she grins back, cheeks gone round and cheerful. ‘So very lucky, and not at all wondering why I didn’t just leave you on Sakaar.’

‘You couldn’t have gotten off that planet without me holding your hand and you know it,’ Valkyrie snorts. ‘And anyway, calm down, I didn’t say it was doomed or anything.’

‘What do you mean?’ Thor asks, the weight in his stomach cautiously lightening. ‘You have a plan?’

Valkyrie ignores him in favour of grinning widely at Korg, who looks behind him and then back to Valkyrie again. He points a finger at his chest and mouths _who, me?_

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Valkyrie asks.

‘Er,’ says Korg. ‘Can’t vouch for that, I’m afraid. Although I _was_ thinking –’

‘I, personally, would love to know what everyone is thinking,’ Thor says loudly.

‘PR campaign!’ Valkyrie turns to him, making some kind of fast waving gesture with both her hands that Thor vaguely recalls seeing in Earth musicals. He frowns. This doesn’t seem the right time for musical theatre.

Valkyrie sighs when he only blinks at her with a total lack of comprehension. ‘Didn’t you pick up anything useful on Midgard? We need to improve Loki’s image. Smarten him up a bit, make him stop wearing so much green and gold, run him around doing a few good deeds and kissing a couple of babies and there you have it, the people are happy, Thor’s happy, everyone’s happy.’

‘What does kissing babies have to do with anything?’ Korg asks, sounding completely mystified. ‘I was more thinking, y’know – get him to muck in with the rest of us, show everyone he’s not as high and mighty as he thinks. I’m not sure we should be letting him near babies.’

‘He definitely won’t be happy, whether we get him to kiss any babies or not,’ Thor says, already grinning at the prospect of the truly petulant scowl this is going to inspire. ‘Especially not about the green and gold part.’

‘Would he rather be unhappy about his wardrobe choices or would he rather be tossed out of the airlock?’ Valkyrie asks pleasantly.

‘Right, right,’ Thor says, and then Valkyrie and Korg put their heads together and start plotting, which starts out impressive and quickly takes a turn for the absurd once Korg sets himself to drawing pictures of Loki doing various good deeds around the ship, and Valkyrie starts doing impressions.

It’s only as he’s leaving to go and deliver the bad news to Loki that Thor realises none of them ever actually asked him whether there was any truth to the rumours, and not once did it occur to him to tell them there wasn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the lovely comments so far! Hope you all enjoy this chapter :D

‘Oh, so you won’t let the hordes of Midgard tear me limb from limb but you’ll let our own people have a go,’ Loki scoffs, which is such an inaccurate synopsis of the situation that Thor has to actually sit down and massage his temples for a second so he doesn’t shout.

‘I just spent hours coming up with a plan to _stop_ them tearing you limb from limb, actually,’ he points out in a very even tone, which makes Loki shut up for all of four seconds before he starts again. Thor doesn’t get another word in before the first evening bell sounds.

‘Oh look, time for dinner,’ he says, launching himself off the bed and escaping down the corridor as fast as he possibly can without Mjolnir to pull him along. God, he misses Mjolnir. It never nagged him about wearing his boots in bed or cackled when he tripped over things.

‘And Odin _never_ had enough respect for the arts,’ Loki is still ranting as they enter the dining hall and a hundred sets of eyes turn on them at once. That’s when Thor remembers the other half of the rumours Gilda had so loudly pointed out to him in front of fifty or so Asgardians a couple of hours ago, which he had forgotten to mention to Loki, and freezes on the spot.

‘Why is everyone staring at us?’ Loki asks calmly. ‘I mean, I know they think I’m a callous murderer and tyrant, but is there anything aside from that?’

Thor thinks over their options for a minute. It really was a shame he’d never got a phone or tablet or any of those flat, small, beeping devices humans so dearly loved – Jane had told him they were excellent in times of crisis when you needed to be called away from a situation quickly, or when you had started walking in one direction and soon realised you needed to be going the other. You could just pretend you had gotten a message on your small beeping device, make a clearly audible noise of comprehension, and turn around with a minimum of social embarrassment.

Although now that he’s faced with an entire hall of gawking subjects and silence in which you could hear a pin drop, Thor is beginning to think there might be some forms of social embarrassment that all the beeping in the world couldn’t fix.

He sighs. If everyone already thinks they’re at it anyway, there’s hardly any point in making Loki sit through a dinner surrounded by curious bystanders just for the sake of saving face. They probably wouldn’t even manage to do that anyway, because Loki would just poke Thor repeatedly until he explained, which he’d try and fail to do in a whisper. (Jane had also been the first person to introduce Thor to the concept of an ‘inside voice’, but perhaps due to his stature and physical strength, he’d found one difficult to cultivate.)

All in all, this is probably not the place for them to have this conversation.

He turns around and drags Loki all the way back to his quarters again.

‘What’s got you in such a lather?’ Loki complains once they get back inside, although he’d stopped ranting about halfway back once he realised Thor was actually preoccupied about something, and just started pestering him to try and find out what it was instead. ‘Why was everyone staring at us? Why couldn’t we stay for dinner? I hope you’re not expecting me to just magic you up something again. You know ensorcelled food doesn’t agree with you.’

Thor turns to face him and opens his mouth, only for nothing to come out. He stares at Loki, completely nonplussed.

‘Well?’ Loki prompts impatiently. ‘I haven’t got all day, brother. Got to go and get righteously slaughtered by the mob at some point, remember?’

‘Did you know people think we’re sleeping together?’ Thor asks bluntly.

‘Technically, we are,’ Loki replies without missing a beat.

Thor frowns.

‘Yes, but – we’re not –’

Loki raises an eyebrow and Thor sets his jaw in frustration, aware that his cheeks are flushing. Alarmingly detailed visions of all the things people think they _might_ be doing together are parading through his head, blithely unconcerned for his blood pressure or how difficult it’s becoming to maintain eye contact. There just doesn’t seem to be anywhere safe to look. Thor always knew that Loki was beautiful, in an abstract, white noise kind of way, but has he always been so – have his eyes always looked so –

‘It’s all totally above board,’ Thor says firmly, mostly just to interrupt his own train of thought. ‘Just sleeping and nothing else.’

‘Yes,’ Loki says in a careful voice after a long pause. His face is entirely blank. ‘I am aware of that.’

Thor coughs and looks away.

‘Well, no one else is. There’s a guard who saw you leaving in the morning and then he told everyone we’re – well, he told everyone you’d stayed over, and now they all think we’re at it, and they don’t trust me because you’re, you know.’

‘A callous murderer and a tyrant,’ Loki supplies.

‘Right,’ says Thor bleakly.

‘It’s like they don’t even remember all the amazing parties I threw,’ Loki complains. Then he frowns. ‘I don’t see why this matters. Whether we’re sleeping together or not, they must know some accord exists between us, or you would have had me imprisoned by now. What do they think to gain by objecting to it?’

‘They seek some reassurance that you are not out to betray us yet again, to cause trouble or bargain us away to someone with a bigger spaceship,’ Thor says dryly, and shrugs when Loki’s mouth tightens. ‘Don’t look at me like that, I couldn’t exactly argue with them! We had an entire conversation about this right before you tried to betray me on Sakaar, remember?’

‘Yes, I remember,’ Loki snaps. ‘Right before _you_ betrayed _me_ , I seem to recall.’

‘Right before you came back to me, ensuring our salvation, determined to fight by my side and save our people,’ Thor says. He can’t help the warmth that leaks into his voice, even though it makes Loki shift impatiently from foot to foot and avoid his eyes.

‘I lacked for other options,’ Loki says flatly.

‘Oh yes, tell them that, that’ll definitely convince them of your loyalty.’

‘Who complained, anyway? Who’s so desperate to see me brought to justice they can’t even wait ten bloody minutes for us to get settled in?’

‘It’s been two weeks,’ Thor points out. ‘And it was Gilda, of House Raynor. Do you have a history?’

Loki screws up his face.

‘I don’t even know who that is. I’m being court-martialled by some nobody from the most boring house in Asgard?’

‘Not so boring now,’ Thor says, raising an eyebrow. ‘In any case, we might assume her grievance is well-founded, even if you don’t remember who she is.’

Loki scowls.

‘How could it be else?’ he sneers, gesturing to himself as sarcastically as a simple hand movement would allow, which turned out to be _very_ sarcastically. ‘Good to know you still expect the worst of me, brother.’

‘Don’t turn this around on me,’ Thor points at him. He decides not to care how much it makes him look like a schoolmistress or beleaguered mother. ‘You’re the one who got us into this mess, you’re getting us out. We’ll worry about Gilda later. Now, have you got any clothes that aren’t, you know,’ he gestures to Loki’s current ensemble, which is mostly comprised of inky green leather with flowing curlicue patterns in gold thread, although there’s also a wide band of green velvet running across his neck for no purpose Thor can discern except to draw attention to how pale it is, how tender.

Loki clears his throat, watching Thor with a slight smirk. Thor blinks. ‘Um. Anything less fancy?’

‘Less fancy,’ Loki repeats with disdain as he folds his arms over his chest. ‘And why might I need something like that?’

‘Ah,’ Thor brightens while Loki looks at him warily, seeming to regret the question. ‘I’m glad you asked.’

\---

‘Livestock,’ Loki says flatly, staring at the paddock in disbelief. A small white goat munches blankly on a genetically engineered mouthful of hay as it stares at him. He turns his entire body in order to glare more thoroughly at Thor, emanating outrage from every pore. ‘You want _me_ to look after _livestock_?’

‘You loved looking after the horses as children,’ Thor lies, hoping that at some point in their separation Loki sustained a blow to the head which caused him to forget his lifelong hatred of cleaning up after animals.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Loki retorts, crushing Thor’s dreams. ‘I hated every second, and you know it.’

‘Oh, alright, have it your way,’ Thor says. ‘But you’ve got to do it anyway, so you might as well at least try to have fun.’

‘I’d like to know how I could possibly have any fun cleaning up goat shit,’ Loki snaps.

‘I’m sure you’ll find a way,’ Thor says with a cheerful grin. ‘You’re very resourceful, it’s one of your best qualities. Remember: be nice! And helpful! Don’t stab anything! We want to humanise you, make the people see you as someone who has to help with the mucking out and the chores just like everyone else, not as someone who disintegrates every living creature that causes them a minor inconvenience.’

‘And when will you be helping with the mucking out and the chores?’ Loki asks, leaning on the paddock fence with both hands and looming menacingly. Or as menacingly as he can when Thor is still an inch taller than him.

‘I’m sure I’ll get around to it at some point,’ Thor says vaguely, still beaming as Loki glares and curses, turning away from Thor in disgust. There is literally nothing that could spoil this for him: the image of Loki with his hands on his hips standing in a small artificially engineered paddock with a goat is going to stay with Thor until his dying day, and hopefully they will let him take it to Valhalla.

‘Why do we even have a goat on board the ship?’ Loki wonders aloud, looking down as the goat approaches him again, possibly wondering if he is an extremely tall and lively blade of grass. Thor had been able to talk Loki down from leather and velvet but he wouldn’t give up the green, so he’s just wearing a distractingly well-tailored bottle green linen suit with ivory ribbons tied in discreet bows at the cuffs. ‘We get all the sustenance we need from the greenhouses, and one goat isn’t going to do much to feed hundreds. It can’t be for breeding purposes because there’s only one, and anyway I know they have goats on Midgard, I saw them on the internet.’

‘I think it’s someone’s pet, to be honest,’ Thor admits. ‘But if it is, they’re not taking very good care of it. They must have gotten distracted. Or maybe it wandered onto the ship on its own, looking for shelter, scared of all the fire and fighting!’

‘I think that might be crediting it with more intelligence than it deserves,’ Loki says, edging away from the goat as it noses at the hem of his trousers.

‘We’re lucky they had this little paddock on here for it, or I think the kitchen would have claimed it,’ Thor says, watching the goat driving Loki into a corner of the paddock with a deep sense of satisfaction. ‘We think the ship might have been intended for long distance colonising, so this was to teach children how to look after animals. And now, to teach you how to be personable.’

Loki’s scowl just makes Thor grin harder. Loki neatly sidesteps the goat and sighs as he pulls a black silk ribbon from his pocket, bending his head to start tying his hair back.

‘Are you waiting for something?’ he snaps while Thor watches him wrap his hair into a low bun, a few black strands loose and curling around his ears. He raises an eyebrow. ‘Or are you just rapt at the sight of my humiliation?’

Thor rolls his eyes extravagantly.

‘Oh right, _this_ is humiliation,’ he smirks, leaning forward against the fence. ‘This, absolutely, and _not_ the time you invited an alien invasion to Midgard and we absolutely kicked your – hey!’

He jumps back as the goat snaps at his fingers. It grins at him menacingly once more for good measure before trooping back to Loki’s side, where Loki pats it gingerly on the head, looking surprised and pleased.

‘Good goat,’ Loki murmurs, just loud enough for Thor to hear. ‘I think I’ll name you Hela.’

\---

It takes Loki about five minutes to start swapping in doubles of himself so he doesn’t have to actually _do_ any of the tasks set for him. Thor is occupied all afternoon arbitrating minor disputes all over the ship and spots at least three different versions of Loki trying to cajole Hela the goat into feeding from his hand, sampling stock from the grapevines on level C with a startled-looking attendant, and focusing intently on removing a blockage from a water filtration pipe on level B.

Thor slows to a halt and watches from behind a bend in the corridor as Loki frowns over the filter, the fine blue strands of his magic tugging gently until a small stone carving comes loose from the grate and water starts gushing through the tube again. Loki smiles in satisfaction as the carving blinks out of the tube and reappears floating over his outstretched palm, rotating slowly. The surrounding crew frown at each other, clearly not sure whether to be impressed or wary.

‘Is that supposed to be you?’ Thor says, forgetting he was supposed to be stealthy and walking over to squint at the carved figurine. ‘It’s got a pointy little helmet and everything.’

‘Of course it’s me,’ Loki rolls his eyes, not even looking up at the sound of Thor’s voice.

‘It’s got a really big head too, that’s accurate.’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ Loki says without heat. ‘I’ll have you know we sold them after every performance of the play. They were very popular.’

‘And now they’re clogging drains, you must be very proud.’

Thor tugs Loki out of earshot of the crew members and Loki goes with uncharacteristic ease, not even pulling out of Thor’s grip. He blinks at Thor mildly, ghost of a smirk hovering around his mouth.

‘Look, I only knew this was the real you because your doubles can’t do _actual_ magic like you can,’ Thor says quietly. ‘You can’t just split yourself into seven to get the work done faster, they’ve got to have no doubts the real you isn’t lying in bed reading adventure verse and eating chocolate-covered almonds –’

‘But who _is_ the real me, brother?’ Loki drawls. He snaps his fingers and the little figurine jerks to life and starts making rude gestures at Thor, or as close as he can get to them when he doesn’t have clearly defined fingers. Loki grins at the look on Thor’s face. ‘An argument could be made that each one of my doubles _is_ me, and I all them. One of your mortals wrote a poem about it – I think it was one of the flamboyantly queer ones – _I contain multitudes,_ something arrogant like that _–_ ’

‘I don’t have time for you to contain multiples,’ Thor interrupts, his voice rising, which just makes Loki’s grin grow viciously wide. ‘If you keep splitting yourself up so you don’t have to do any real work, people will start to notice, and then it’s going to make you look even worse.’

‘But I can get even more done this way,’ Loki points out. He stops the figurine with a click of his tongue and slips it into his pocket. He stands there widening his eyes at Thor as if this is going to make him forget what they’re talking about. (That has only worked once. Perhaps a couple of times at _most_.) ‘And it’s not like I never used magic in front of them before.’

‘You weren’t trying to prove yourself a hard-working and loyal member of society before,’ Thor returns swiftly.

Loki’s eyes narrow suddenly, the joke flitting from him in less time than it takes for Thor to draw breath.

‘No, because they already assumed me incapable of being one,’ he hisses, yanking himself free of Thor’s hold with a single furious movement.

Thor very carefully keeps all his immediate responses to that inside his skull and thinks for a moment, eying the tense line of Loki’s shoulders, the way his eyes are glittering defiantly. He should have put more thought into how much this plan was going to rankle Loki, but at the time it had seemed like such a good solution to more than one of their problems – after all, it was obvious that Loki was getting bored just mooching around and was probably only a few days short of causing _actual_ trouble, and they could always use more hands to help around the ship, regardless of whether the help was suspiciously received.

As the god of mischief, you’d think Loki was used to being mistrusted, but then again that’s never stopped him complaining about it before.

‘Loki, we need you,’ Thor says eventually, on the basis that appeals to Loki’s vanity rarely go awry. Loki rolls his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest, but at least he doesn’t stomp away. ‘They’ll come around, they just need to be persuaded you’re not going to throw them over at the first possible opportunity.’

‘How is any of this going to prove that?’ Loki asks, finally looking at him. It comes out more plaintive than Thor was prepared for, Loki’s eyes now earnestly wide, but Loki doesn’t give him any time to recover from his surprise. ‘Why would any of it change what they think of me? A few odd jobs is going to wipe my record clean? Surely their memories are not that short, brother.’

‘I don’t think it’s the acts themselves, necessarily,’ Thor says hesitantly, aware of how shaky the ground beneath this conversation. ‘I think it’s just – that you’re trying. It doesn’t hurt to show that you care what they think of you.’

‘So your plan is for me to abase myself back into their good books,’ Loki asks, looking at Thor with a shade more good humour, as if this at least is a manipulation he can respect. Thor is bolstered by it, feeling almost irrationally fond. Loki is skilled at deploying his vulnerability to get what he wants in a way that reminds Thor of Natasha, but where Natasha is rarely ever telling the truth, Loki almost always is: that he wields his own insecurity so effectively doesn’t stop it from hurting him.

‘Actually, I have an idea which I thought might be better suited to you,’ Thor says brightly. ‘That’s why I came to find you, and not for any other reason,’ he finishes loudly, waving at the crew, who just stare at him. One of them raises his hand slowly in reply before another one smacks it down, hissing at him.

‘Oh good, more excellent ideas from Thor,’ Loki sighs with a total and complete lack of enthusiasm. ‘Can’t I just push Heimdall down the stairs or something?’

‘How is that a good deed?’ Thor asks, bewildered.

‘It would give everyone a good laugh,’ Loki says, the corner of his mouth twitching. ‘I’m laughing on the inside just picturing it.’

‘Well, keep it on the inside,’ Thor advises him, and tugs him away by the sleeve even as Loki groans and tries to make himself a dead weight.

He leads Loki to the empty room on level A that they’re charitably calling the library, although ‘three disordered trunks of miscellaneous court records and a few salvaged books of lore’ would be more accurate.

‘This is what we managed to save from the palace,’ he starts, then realises he’s not sure what else to say. It hadn’t seemed that important when he was going out of his mind trying to figure out how their rations were going to last the year-long trip to Earth, but now in the quiet, in this sad and dusty room with Loki, it sinks into him like a numbing blade. These few lonely piles of paper are all they have left of their history: all they have of Asgardian poetry, music, stories. They’ve always had something of an oral tradition in Asgard but Thor spent years of their childhood tearing into the library with the sole purpose of trying to drag Loki away from whatever tome he had perched across his lap that day, usually with little success. Most of the books had been heavier than him back then, giant volumes bound in dark leathers, filled with secrets. Thor had learned almost all of Asgard’s greatest legends in his brother’s voice because Loki had always distracted him from his games with wit and words, reading to him until they grew hungry or tired, and once they were finished eating or napping he would read to Thor some more, because he always said it was rude to leave a tale half-told.

All those tales are lost now, every single one.

Or perhaps not all. Thor smiles at a surfacing memory and Loki notices, shooting him a sideways look.

‘Do I want to know?’

‘Do you remember that story about Father cutting out his own eye and dropping it into Mimir’s well to gain more knowledge? And you said –’

‘That anyone stupid enough to cut out his own eye didn’t deserve the knowledge Mimir could give him,’ Loki finishes, grinning with his tongue stuck in his cheek, clearly trying not to laugh. ‘And I stand by that, you know; you’re an idiot to have been so careless with yours. It must run in the family. And now you’ve only got one left, so you definitely can’t fall for the old ‘long-lost evil sister pinning you to the palace balcony and gouging out your eye’ trick again.’

‘Oldest trick in the book,’ Thor says serenely, and Loki gives an undignified snort.

‘Idiot,’ he says again softly, nudging Thor with his shoulder. Thor nudges back and then sighs as his gaze returns to the sad stack of boxes.

‘Who even dragged this stuff onto the ship anyway?’ Loki asks, brow wrinkling. ‘In the middle of _Ragnarok?_ Like, actual end of the world Ragnarok?’

‘Someone who doesn’t have their priorities straight, I assume,’ Thor frowns. ‘The people were half mad from fear and hunger by then, anyway. We shouldn’t judge them. I’ve been told that people grab weird stuff when their house is on fire.’

‘Is that another of Jane’s aphorisms, brother?’ Loki asks, a slightly sour note in his voice.

‘No,’ Thor protests. He frowns. ‘I think it might have been Natasha, actually.’

‘What would she know about it?’ Loki scoffs. ‘I doubt she’s ever met a fire she couldn’t put out with a single glare.’

‘You don’t know her,’ Thor says, a slight edge in his voice that makes Loki set his jaw. ‘She knows how it feels to lose everything, Loki. Just like Steve, and Banner, and –’

‘Yes, yes, all your friends have very tragic pasts that would make excellent ballads or three-act theatrical performances,’ Loki snaps. ‘Look, we’re getting off-track here. What does any of this have to do with me?’

‘Maybe we could learn something from them,’ Thor persists. Loki frowns at him. ‘They know about rebuilding, brother. We have that in common with them now, if nothing else. Steve had to accept a great many unhappy things about his country’s history when he woke up from the ice, doesn’t that sound familiar to you? Think about it – Father never told us about Hela because he never wanted us to know how Asgard gained its wealth and power, but we know it now, and we can’t go back.’

‘I always suspected there was a greater thirst for blood in our father’s past than he ever owned up to,’ Loki says begrudgingly. ‘There was _way_ too much gold inlay in the palace for it to have all been peaceful conquest. I mean, did you ever take a really good look at those wall sconces?’

‘And the tapestries,’ Thor agrees.

‘And the bathtubs made of solid gold,’ Loki sighs. ‘And the –’

‘Anyway,’ Thor continues hastily, ‘we can’t change the past, but we can decide how Asgard is defined in the future.’

He pauses, recognising how painfully sincere it sounds when Loki raises an incredulous eyebrow. Thor grins at him, he can’t help it. Every so often some look or quirk of Loki’s expression will strike him like an arrow and he’ll remember all over again how much he’d missed it, when Loki was gone. No one ever mentions that in the epic ballads of love lost: how much it’s possible to miss the way someone rolls their eyes at you.

‘Hmm. I suppose so,’ Loki says sceptically. ‘If you’re going to be all noble and kingly about it. Is this a permanent state of affairs now? Are you just going to give me that horrifically earnest look every time you’re not getting your way?’

Thor gives him the horrifically earnest look again. Loki sighs.

‘Then how are we to go about it, dear brother? What’s your cunning plan?’

‘Well,’ Thor begins, and this is where he starts to blush. What he has in mind will necessarily entail a reminder that Loki is still a prince of Asgard, no matter how hard they’ve been trying to put him on a level with everyone else on the ship. Which could backfire horribly, or it could fix things. So pretty much a normal day, really.

Loki is silent, watching him curiously. Thor clears his throat.

‘When I was thinking about how we read together as children –’

‘How I read to you,’ Loki corrects.

‘Fine, yes,’ Thor rolls his eyes, ‘and how you were always good at remembering all the poetry – you used to run rings around the bards, do you remember? It made Father furious – and I thought that maybe you could, er. That if you wanted to, you could – record what you remember of the ones we saw performed. But – differently.’

‘Differently,’ Loki says, stretching the word out like toffee. ‘You want me to bastardise our nation’s greatest poetic achievements, the ones that have been passed down from generation to generation since the beginning of the world?’

‘Bastardise is such a strong word,’ Thor squirms, toeing a spilling pile of handwritten papers. ‘But – don’t you think it’s unfair, now that we know the truth, the way all those stories get told? As if Father was the benevolent victor and everyone else just got what was coming to them?’

‘Oh, you want me to slander the name of our beloved dead Father!’ Loki exclaims in mock understanding. ‘Now it all makes sense.’

‘It’s not slander if they’ve actually done everything you say they’ve done,’ Thor says, frowning. ‘Then it’s just telling the truth. Father _was_ a liar, and he _did_ take things that didn’t belong to him, like _entire planets_ – and look, we’ve got to start taking responsibility for it sooner or later. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, and carry on all ‘oh, the mighty nation of Asgard, we definitely didn’t get where we are by killing loads of people who didn’t deserve it and taking all their land’!’

He looks at Loki expectantly, but Loki is just watching him with an expression as if he thinks Thor might have finally gone snapped under the pressure. Thor sighs. He’s not even sure Loki would be wrong, at this point. But everything he just said _feels_ true, and Jane had often encouraged him to ‘feel his feelings’ rather than simply bottling them up, and now he actually has the power to do something with them. Something that wouldn’t make everything right, but which would at least set the record straight.

‘How did you think Father’s rule came to stretch over the nine realms?’ Loki asks eventually. ‘I know you weren’t asleep through _all_ our history lessons.’

‘They didn’t tell us what really happened, though, did they?’ Thor points out. ‘They told us what Father wanted us to know. What he wanted to be true.’

‘That he’d won the lands peacefully,’ Loki says, his eyes contemplative.

‘That the people were grateful,’ Thor says sadly. ‘That they thanked him for taking control and ruling fairly.’

And he says it he feels the wrongness of it, the insufferable way Odin had lied to them – lied to _all_ of them, and used Hela and discarded her as if she were worth less to him than even a foot soldier, when she was the rightful heir to the throne.

‘He ruled them all equally mercilessly, if that counts,’ Loki says in a bitter voice.

‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,’ Thor tells him, watching Loki closely. ‘God knows, there’s enough other work to do. But you’ve got the memory and the wordsmithing for it, brother, and it would be a task worthy of your talents. We need something to bring the people together, remind them why Asgard is worth struggling for. I think this could be it.’

‘You don’t need to lay it on that thick,’ Loki says, cheeks flushing a little pink. His eyes dart to Thor and then away again, as if he needs to take what he sees in small doses; he sounds almost cross at being praised like that, unsure of how to react. A lock of hair falls loose from his bun and Thor actually starts reaching out to brush it behind his ear before he catches himself and puts his hand back down, wide-eyed. He clasps his hands behind his back to remove the temptation and then just stands there for a minute, silently appalled at himself.

What is _happening_ to him?

‘We don’t even know exactly how all Odin’s conquests were won,’ Loki says, almost to himself. Thor gratefully seizes on the familiar tone of his voice as a distraction – it’s the curious one that in their youth had always evolved sooner or later into Loki devoting his undivided attention to some matter of magic or mischief, probably not even coming out of his room for meals or games of ‘I wonder if anyone else can pick up Mjolnir yet, oh no, it’s still just Thor’.

‘Then it’s time to find out,’ Thor says. ‘Valkyrie fought Hela the first time, so you can ask her about that, and I know there are elders who heard stories from their parents too. And – okay, this part is even more optional but I thought maybe we could get some of the children in to scribe and make copies? I’ve had a dozen parents come forward and complain that without schooling they’re just running wild, and I thought that way we might preserve your work and teach them at the same time, and also –’

‘You want me to –’ Loki starts sharply, and then holds up a hand, looking as if he doesn’t even know where to begin. ‘You want Asgard’s children to be taught wordsmithing by taking down stories of bloodshed and war, with _me_ as their teacher?’

‘Oh,’ Thor frowns. ‘I actually hadn’t – that’s a terrible idea, isn’t it? After they’re already so traumatised –’

‘It’s a terrible idea, but we can fix it,’ Loki says a bit testily, bringing a hand to his temples. ‘If you want scribes, I think we might make good use of our miscreant youths.’ He grins wickedly. ‘It’s about time Leif and Einarr learned to work together without their arms strapped to each other’s backs, anyway.’

‘That’s a great idea!’ Thor laughs, beaming at Loki. ‘Oh, they’ll hate it –’

Loki gives a surprised laugh.

‘Do you think so?’ he asks sceptically. ‘Einarr’s definitely got a bookish side, although of course he pretends he doesn’t.’

‘That may well be, but they’re still just boys, not scholars,’ Thor points out. ‘But they’d do well to learn patience.’

Loki nods absently, clearly already focused on the task ahead. Thor’s struck by the urge to just – do something ridiculous, like pick him up by the waist and give him a huge bear hug or something. Perhaps Loki can tell, because his mouth quirks in a half grin that almost, for a second, gives Thor the courage to try it.

Almost.

‘This is so great,’ Thor tells him instead, voice made colourful with joy. Loki rolls his eyes but he does it fondly, before his half smile fades. He starts to say something and then hesitates.

‘Why are you trusting me with this?’ he asks eventually, in a smaller voice than Thor expects. ‘You shouldn’t. It’s stupid.’

‘You were literally just complaining about nobody trusting you,’ Thor reminds him, nonplussed.

‘Yes, I know,’ Loki rolls his eyes. ‘I’m not complaining, I’m just asking – why?’

‘Why not? Are you planning to hurt anyone?’

‘No,’ Loki says immediately, and then curses out loud.

‘Yeah,’ Thor says, grinning. ‘Exactly. And you won’t be writing poems about yourself, so I can hardly see you warping them to suit your own purposes.’

‘That’s because you’ve got no imagination,’ Loki snaps.

‘I never needed to. You’ve got more than enough for both of us,’ Thor says. It comes out more sincerely admiring than he intended it to and Loki blinks, caught off-guard. Thor can’t think of anything else to say that won’t be even more incriminating, and briefly spares a thought for the time in his life when he didn’t feel the need to watch his own every move around Loki, afraid of what he might give away.

‘Right,’ Loki says slowly after a moment.

‘It just,’ Thor starts and then frowns, trying to put it into words. ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s –’ he realises he was about to say ‘a task worthy of you’ again and stops, because he might be trying to butter Loki up but that would definitely be one too many ego injections for this conversation. ‘It’ll show them you care.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Loki asks, sounding genuinely curious. ‘For me to care?’

‘I don’t have to,’ Thor says, spreading his arms to encompass the two of them, the room, the whole damn _ship._ He grins at Loki helplessly even as Loki gets his meaning and his face starts to get that pinched look again. ‘You already do.’

\---

In hindsight, it’s not surprising Thor manages to do something to ruin it within half an hour. Things had been going far too well.

They argue about who gets to tell Leif and Einarr they’ll be scribing all the way back to Thor’s rooms. They’ve nearly hit his front door when Thor remembers why Loki shouldn’t be coming inside with him, and he nearly cuts Loki off mid-sentence blurting it out.

‘Oh, but we can’t,’ he starts, ‘you can’t –’ and then abruptly loses all his words at the look on Loki’s face: he masks his disappointment quickly but it still stings. He looks furious with himself for not knowing any better.

The reality of it settles in on Thor all at once: Loki had assumed they would come back here together, that he would bathe as usual and then they would sit around and talk and tease each other until they grew tired enough to sleep, spending the evening together as they have whenever Thor could spare the time. Because Thor can admit now that that’s what they were doing, even if he couldn’t before, and now he has to stop them doing it, and he’s stumbling over everything he’s going to miss, every small detail – like the way Loki’s hair fans out over the pillow when they lie down together, and Thor bunches it up in a knot so that he can press his cold nose to Loki’s neck in the night and hear the small disgruntled noise Loki makes in his sleep. The way he snorts when Thor manages to make him really, properly laugh, sides shaking under Thor’s fingers. How sensitive the backs of his knees and the soles of his feet, jumping a mile if Thor so much as brushes against him, waking them both up. He whines about being cold at night as if he isn’t a bloody _frost giant,_ and Thor lets him because it gives him an excuse to hold Loki closer and for longer, and he realises with a sinking feeling in his stomach that he’s going to miss it just as terribly as he first missed Loki when their paths had begun to diverge years ago, when he hadn’t known if they would ever be that close again.

‘I see,’ is all Loki says, his voice cool and distant. Thor hates the sound of it even as he knows he deserves it.

‘Only because,’ he flounders weakly, ‘I mean, we should – it’s best to keep to our own quarters, while there are so many rumours flying around. It’s for your reputation, remember? We don’t want people to get the wrong idea.’

‘Sounds like they already have it,’ Loki observes dispassionately. ‘But of course, we wouldn’t want them to think their king would go anywhere near a traitor like me if he could possible help it, would we?’

He gives Thor a nasty smile and a parting bow that jars painfully with how comfortable they’d been together just a few moments earlier. Thor scrambles for something to say to soften the blow but Loki is already walking away from him, back the way they came, vanishing swiftly out of sight.

\---

When Thor drags himself out of bed the next morning after a sleepless night, it takes a few minutes of sleepily getting dressed before he realises it’s too quiet, too _easy_ – he isn’t tripping over a million of Loki’s shiny trinkets and bottles of scented water and bejewelled weapons. He searches the room from top to bottom but every scrap of Loki’s clothing, every hair ribbon and perfectly shined boot, every piece of him that had filtered its way into Thor’s surroundings is gone. He must have spelled it all back to his own quarters during the night rather than come and ask for any of it back in the morning.

The mental image of Loki’s clothes parading through the silent, dark corridors of the ship while everyone is asleep is hilarious, but Thor is too upset to really enjoy it. The palpable lack of Loki’s presence in his room stings so much that it forces a half bark of disbelieving laughter out of him before he starts berating himself for expecting anything more mature. Loki is too good at being dramatic to go about this any other way – too good at hurting and shoving it in other people’s faces, and Thor should have remembered that before he blundered on in and hurt him anyway.

The gaps where Loki’s things used to fit keep catching his eye until he throws up his hands and leaves early to just wander around the ship aimlessly, in a sullen mood he can’t seem to shake off. He’d complained about his room being full of Loki’s junk but now it’s gone he’d take it all back in a heartbeat. He didn’t think it would be so noticeable, being alone.

This spiteful little parting gift turns out to be a fairly good indicator of how Loki intends to behave for the foreseeable future.

‘Did you bleach all his clothes when you broke up with him or something?’ Valkyrie asks a few days later while they’re sat in the cafeteria, having just witnessed Loki walk blithely past their table with his nose in the air. ‘I haven’t seen a snub that savage since oh, I don’t know, the _last_ time you tried to get his attention and he ignored you. Korg, did you prefer when he let the door slam in Thor’s face this morning, or when he turned all the clothes in his wardrobe neon pink?’

‘Neon pink,’ Korg says firmly. ‘You’ve definitely got the colouring for it, mate.’

Thor sags in his seat, glaring at the two of them.

‘He’s just smarting from the way I handled it. He’ll come around.’ Thor says, ostensibly to Valkyrie but at least half in reassurance to himself as he stares at the back of Loki’s head. It hasn’t escaped his notice that Loki always sits within Thor’s field of vision, as if taunting him with his very presence.

It also hasn’t escaped Thor’s notice that this is working.

He eats another half of his dinner before he remembers to say: ‘And we didn’t break up, because we were never together.’

Korg and Valkyrie exchange a glance. Korg shrugs and goes back to cracking his knuckles nervously, shedding tiny slivers of rock.

‘If you say so,’ Valkyrie murmurs, one eyebrow raised.

Loki seems to be on a mission to remind Thor what he’s missing: if he isn’t hanging around in earshot of Thor’s table in the cafeteria, he’s darting around the ship taking care of minor engineering and maintenance glitches before Thor even knows they’ve come up. It occurs to him right around the time Loki stops a major power outage with a carefully timed jolt of magic just as Thor runs, panting, through the door, that if Loki was purposely trying to make him look bad, he couldn’t be doing a better job.

Loki’s triumphant, knowing grin follows him around the ship all afternoon.

The most frustrating aspect of all this – well, one of the most frustrating – is that Loki won’t let him near the work he’s doing, the work _Thor_ asked him to do. He’s happy for Thor to watch as he whizzes around the ship performing a miracle a day as if he’s operating on an internal barometer monitoring public opinion, but he puts his foot down whenever Thor tries to help with the poem.

‘Why do you want anything to do with it anyway?’ Valkyrie asks him as she idly hangs sideways out of her chair, plaiting and unplaiting a braid. She’d been doing it all the way through office hours and it had soothed Thor to look up every now and then to watch her untangle the strands of her hair and start the braid over again, the motion of her hands familiar and unhurried. A brief sense memory of running his fingers through Loki’s hair under the pretence of braiding it drifts through his head, but Thor pushes it away: it’s been so long since Loki permitted him that, it may as well be a dream. ‘You’re not really a poetry kinda guy.’

‘I might be,’ Thor says, nettled. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Oh, do forgive me, your majesty,’ she drawls, rolling her eyes, drooping even more exaggeratedly in her chair. Thor can’t restrain a grin. Her cheeks go round and impish. ‘It really wouldn’t be fair if you could, though. Not on top of – you know. Everything else.’

She gestures vaguely to where he sits on the throne. He raises an eyebrow and she snaps her fingers.

‘Yep! Exactly that. Just totally unfair.’

‘Oh really?’ Thor asks, batting his eyelashes ostentatiously.

‘Don’t write cheques you can’t cash,’ she grins at him. ‘Anyway, why are you so bothered about it?’

‘He actually laughed in my face yesterday,’ Thor tells her glumly. ‘When I offered to help him come up with a rhyme for something.’

‘What was it a rhyme for?’ Valkyrie asks, holding her face suspiciously straight.

‘I’m not telling you,’ Thor mutters. ‘You’ll just laugh at me. Oh look, it’s Hulk.’

She narrows her eyes, not even remotely tricked into turning around to check.

‘Worth a try,’ Thor winks at her, and laughs when she sticks out her tongue. 

‘Look, I can’t believe I’m saying this,’ she starts, after a pause. ‘But just trust him, yeah? Leave him to it, I would. He’s not doing a bad job.’

Thor sits up straighter in his seat.

‘You’ve seen it? You’ve talked to him?’ he asks quickly.

‘I was there, remember?’ Valkyrie smiles at him sadly. She shrugs, sighing as she runs her fingers through the braid again, starting over. ‘I fought Hela, before. He had to ask me what I remembered.’

‘Thank you,’ Thor tells her, trying to smile in return. She looks awfully small over there all of a sudden, tucked up in her chair, eyes distant, for all that he knows she could chuck him halfway across the room. He wishes he knew how comfortable she is with hugs. There just never seems a convenient time to ask these sorts of questions without seeming like a creep.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Valkyrie rolls her eyes at him. ‘My point is, the plan’s working, right? People are warming up to him, he’s off doing what you asked him to do. So why are you still moping around?’

Thor doesn’t have an answer to that, but he doesn’t have to suffer much longer with his curiosity anyway: Leif turns up outside his door before breakfast bell a week later, armed with a mulish expression and an apple.

Thor stands in the doorway shirtless and messy-haired, blinking at Leif blearily and taking the apple when it’s thrust unceremoniously in his direction, wondering if his brain is finally resorting to hallucinations in protest at his lack of sleep. Leif stands there in silence, contemplating him with an offensive and vaguely familiar degree of irritation. Apparently he isn’t just learning wordsmithing from Loki.

‘Loki sent me,’ Leif says stiffly.

‘Yes, I got that, thanks,’ Thor says around a mouthful of apple, pulling a shirt on as they speak. Something glimmering and bright-eyed is rushing through him at the thought, as meagre as the summons is: Loki _wants_ him for something. Loki _sent_ for him. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Aelfhun, of House Fell,’ Leif tells him with reluctance, and sighs when Thor takes another massive bite and motions for him to continue. Thor remembers Aelfhun: they had fought well in the games held during Thor’s tenth year, and danced just as proudly with the girls in the celebrations after, without any objection from the royal court despite a few mutterings from some of the more old-fashioned houses. For all that it presumably stemmed from complete self-absorption, Odin’s complete disinterest in the personal lives of his subjects and soldiers did have its advantages. ‘They won’t tell us anything, your majesty. Not unless you come.’

‘Oh, is that _so,_ ’ Thor says with palpable delight. Leif rolls his eyes so thoroughly Thor makes note to actually start monitoring how much he spends in Loki’s company, and to find him some new role models.

‘I’m not an idiot,’ Aelfhun says flatly when Thor is in front of them. They’re seated in the common area of Dormitory 5, which despite a total lack of geographical accuracy has been nicknamed the North on account of the rather fickle nature of its central heating system. Aelfhun is wrapped in a blanket or seven, their looping braided iron-grey hair heaped high on their head. Loki is kneeling like a penitent at their side and looking as uncomfortable as Thor would expect in the pose. Thor tries to restrain his delight at the thought of how thoroughly Loki’s robes will crease; Loki glares at him in a manner which suggests he is not successful. ‘I won’t go telling tales and getting beheaded for it next time we set foot on land. I want the king’s word on it.’

‘No one is going to behead you,’ Loki says soothingly, patting Aelfhun on the shoulder, and then his voice turns to steel as he flashes his eyes meaningfully at Thor. ‘Are they, brother?’

‘Of course not,’ Thor says hastily, wrenching his mind back to the situation at hand rather than wondering how long it took Loki to spell his nails that particular shade of green, glittering with the hue of leaves just slipping into autumnal red. One nail on each hand is painted disarmingly gold. ‘No beheadings, I promise.’

‘Not even when you hear what I have to say about your father?’ Aelfhun asks warily.

‘At this point, both of us have probably said worse,’ Thor says, nodding at Loki, and Aelfhun gives a gruff, reluctant laugh. Even Loki manages a small smile. ‘Go on with your story, Aelfhun.’

‘I heard it from my father, who told me against my mother’s wishes,’ Aelfhun warns them. ‘And I imagine he’d heard it from his father three times back, if you get my meaning, so I can’t speak for the accuracy of the thing.’

‘We just need the gist,’ Thor says.

‘I think you’re the only one who knows about Midgard,’ Loki says softly. His eyes flicker up to Thor, who spreads his hands wide, trying to telegraph openness. Loki’s mouth twitches a little before he goes on. ‘How Father abandoned it. Or – whatever happened, however much there is to tell. We can get the rest from their storybooks when we arrive, I’m sure.’

He smiles at Aelfhun, who pats him absentmindedly before turning to take a mug of herbal tea from Leif. He watches in silence, trying to process the difference in how he’d imagined these meetings. He hadn’t assumed Loki would go around yanking stories out of the elders with no finesse – Loki knows exactly how charming he can be, when needed – but he hadn’t expected Loki to treat them so patiently. For him to smile at Aelfhun like that, unguarded and open, like he hasn’t smiled at Thor for days. It reminds him of how Loki used to pay attention in their lessons, his head cocked at that same angle, listening intently to the tutors he believed to be wise.

Thor grins faintly, remembering the enchanted paper ravens Loki would send after the tutors he did _not_ believe to be wise. 

‘Midgard was the last of the realms Odin claimed,’ Aelfhun starts, ‘and by all accounts, he was not best pleased with it.’

‘Like father, like son,’ Thor mutters, looking pointedly at Loki, who rolls his eyes.

‘I wasn’t _displeased,_ ’ Loki argues. ‘But you have to admit, their view of the universe is hilariously limited, and most of them have absolutely terrible dress sense –’

‘Do you want to hear this story or not?’ Aelfhun intones loudly.

‘Yes, yes,’ Thor and Loki say in unison, and Loki scowls at Thor before straightening his face back into an expression of flawless attention. Thor rolls his eyes. Always the teacher’s pet.

‘By the time Odin came to Midgard, he was tired and battle-weary,’ Aelfhun tells them. ‘It was a small realm in comparison to the others he had conquered, just a spit of rock in the middle of nowhere. He brought but a fraction of his army, and left Hela to recoup in Asgard. He did not expect what he found – that is, a civilisation whose lifespans would pass in the blink of an eye but that were still capable of telling stories, of trading and building, and above all, of worship.’

Thor exchanges a wary glance with Loki.

‘He took a few Midgardians aside and elected to make friends of them, for as long as he and his men remained. He told them of his beautiful homeland, his wife, and his sons.’

Aelfhun smiles at Thor when his eyebrows go up.

‘Yes, you,’ Aelfhun laughs. ‘You are aware of no other sons, are you?’

‘Well –’ Thor starts, but stops when Loki mimes cutting his throat with just a little too much enthusiasm. ‘No! No. Of course not. It’s fine. Carry on.’

Aelfhun doesn’t look fooled, but Thor sees no need to worry. If Odin had any more children that are hanging around anywhere, they’re bound to show up at some point. He and Loki can cross that bridge if they come to it, although hopefully Thor won’t lose the other eye in the process.

‘Odin returned to Asgard after he’d imparted his wisdom to the Midgardians,’ Aelfhun continues wryly, ‘and did not return for many years.’

‘How many years?’ Thor asks suspiciously.

‘Long enough to have become legend,’ Aelfhun replies. Their mouth twitches. ‘And you know how it is with legends, your majesty.’

‘Please, call me Thor,’ Thor says absently.

‘Yes, please do,’ Loki murmurs.

‘Odin had been away for so long that his words had been passed down from parent to child and on, on, from generation to generation, and much had been lost from telling to telling. But more had grown from them, too – they believed you guided them as they travelled across the oceans because of your power over the wind and skies, Thor. Isn’t that wonderful?’

Thor smiles while Aelfhun beams.

‘Certainly sounds like Midgardians,’ he says with a grin. He winks at Loki. ‘What had they to say of my brother?’

Loki purses his lips, probably to restrain himself from sticking out his tongue.

‘Oh, that he was a trickster god,’ Aelfhun says dismissively. But then they clap their hands together. ‘Wait! Another thing. They also believed Loki could shapeshift, into a hawk, a fly, a seal –’

‘Aw,’ says Thor. ‘Sweet.’

‘– and a mare, in which form he was impregnated, and gave birth to an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir,’ Aelfhun finishes contentedly. ‘Which was fathered upon him by a giant stallion.’

There is a short, deadly pause.

‘I’m sorry,’ Thor says, his voice so level you could rest a shelf on it. ‘Could you just repeat that? _How_ many legs?’

‘Definitely eight,’ Aelfhun says firmly. Loki is turning a really interesting shade of vermilion. Thor would give his eye all over again for one of those camera phones so he could preserve this moment forever. ‘Quite an imagination, some of these mortals! Of course, Odin didn’t disavow them of their beliefs.’ Aelfhun smiles indulgently. ‘They were to him as children, and he saw no harm in allowing them to continue on their path. They clearly didn’t present a threat, and were as likely to kill themselves before they even had time to venture off-planet and go looking for trouble. Is that how you’ve found them to be, Thor?’

‘Er,’ Thor says. ‘Well. Usually the trouble seems to come to them, to be honest.’

‘Odd,’ Aelfhun frowns. ‘Well, in any case, Odin left them to it.’ They take a long drink of their tea, and sit in contented silence for a moment. ‘By all accounts, they’ve made a right pig’s ear of the planet since then.’  

‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s –’ Thor starts, just as Loki smoothly interjects, ‘Thank you for your candour, Aelfhun.’

‘You’re welcome. I guess he just didn’t know what to do with Midgard,’ they shrug, then frown. ‘I’m told it’s quite small, is that right? And the people close-minded?’

‘Not all of them,’ Thor hedges. He brightens. ‘I have a number of good friends who still reside there, and I’d be happy to introduce them to you. One of them is an astrophysicist.’

 Aelfhun frowns.

‘She studies the stars,’ he explains, and their expression clears.

‘Oh, well,’ they say dismissively. ‘We all do that.’

‘That was a bit of an anti-climax,’ Thor says to Loki as they walk down the corridor away from Dormitory 5, Leif and Einarr following. He’s purposely dragging his feet in the hope that if they walk slow enough, Loki won’t remember he’s mad at Thor until they hit the main concourse at least.

‘Not all stories are death and destruction,’ Loki observes, then frowns. ‘But I did expect a bit more death and destruction than that, I’ll admit. They made it sound so dramatic before you got here. You never read any of that in their books when you were on Earth?’

‘Not the bit you’ll be thinking of, brother,’ Thor grins, knocking Loki with his shoulder. ‘I congratulate you on your stamina. Or should that be on your child-bearing hips?’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Loki snaps, but he’s hiding a smile, Thor can see it. ‘That’s hardly the most important detail of what they told us.’

‘No,’ Thor agrees. ‘S’funny, though.’

Loki rolls his eyes and hesitates before he gives a small snort of laughter.

‘It’s strange,’ Thor says, startled at the lump in his throat. He coughs and goes on when Loki raises an eyebrow. ‘I know it should make me hate him even more, that he could just wave a hand and – and write them off like that, and in a way it does. But I can’t help it, I –’

‘Miss him,’ Loki finishes. Thor stares at him. Loki shrugs. ‘Once an entitled bastard, always an entitled bastard.’

Thor grins.

‘Can’t you just picture him – them all on bended knee, convinced he’s a god, and he’s looking around at the planet and thinking _wow, no wonder you’re easily pleased_ –’

‘Of course he thought it was his right to be worshipped,’ Loki says, grinning back at Thor, who suddenly feels on the verge of dizzied, semi-hysterical laughter. ‘It took me years to work up the courage just to stop calling him ‘sir’. Can you imagine what a mortal would have thought, looking up at _that_?’

‘Like you can talk,’ Thor manages. Loki’s eyes widen with outrage for a second before the moment breaks and then they’re laughing, giggles and snorts breaking out of them in waves, and it’s loud enough that Leif and Einarr are looking at each other as if they’re not sure if sedatives might be called for, or if this is another facet of something bizarre and idiosyncratic that no one has yet elected to explain to them.

‘God,’ Thor chokes out after a dazed few minutes. Loki is leaning against the wall, breathing in and out in measured bursts. Thor wipes a hand over his face, not even that surprised to find his eyes are wet. ‘He was such a – such a _dick_.’

‘Unbelievably so,’ Loki agrees, still a little breathless. He meets Thor’s eyes and smiles. ‘But he was our dick.’

They watch each other for a long moment, both grinning, before they burst out laughing again.

\---

Things start to improve after that, although it happens gradually, like Loki is hoping Thor might not notice. Loki starts dropping by their table occasionally to confirm a detail or offer an opinion, and he doesn’t turn Thor’s hair stupid colours during office hours nearly as many times that week. He takes to accompanying Thor on his maintenance missions rather than taking them over, and he doesn’t flit away as soon as the task is complete. He stops overtaking Thor at every turn, brandishing his efficiency like a trophy: stops brushing Thor off and running away. Or at least, he stops running quite so far, so fast.

At first it’s all Thor can do not to seize it with both hands, drag Loki back to his quarters and sit on him until he promises not to withdraw like that again. But there’s something in Loki’s eyes that makes him hesitate, a wariness limned with anticipation. It feels like the crackle in the air before the lightning hits him, the hum in his bones before it strikes.  

‘This is so embarrassing,’ Valkyrie tells him one day as she walks past the paddock, where Thor is propped against the fence, watching Hela the goat contentedly feeding from Loki’s hand. Loki’s eyes are turned down, lashes brushing his cheeks, as he talks to the goat in a low, quiet voice. Thor has absolutely no idea what to do with visual information this startling: it’s possible his brain might be broken. ‘Not for me, I mean. For you.’

‘You’re one to talk,’ Thor replies, rounding on her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Hulk told me you and Gilda have actually been spending quite a bit of time together.’

Valkyrie stops in her tracks and turns to face him, her face suspiciously blank.

‘I doubt he did,’ she says, clearly stalling.

‘No, you’re right, I’m paraphrasing,’ Thor says with great cheer. ‘Would you like me to tell you what he actually said? Something along the lines of VAL and GILDA and TONGUES –’

‘Alright, alright,’ Valkyrie says, rolling her eyes even as her mouth twitches. She gives a half shrug. ‘Keep your enemies close and all that, isn’t that what they say?’

‘I don’t know if we need to keep them that close,’ Thor says, propping his chin on his hand and gazing at her in mock concern. ‘It’s admirable that you’re so committed to Loki winning back the people’s good opinion, but you mustn’t feel the need to actually stick your tongue down the enemy’s throat.’

‘The enemy was choking on a grape,’ Valkyrie grits out. ‘I was just helping her get it out.’

‘Did she ask you to go back to her quarters and look at her etchings too?’ Thor asks innocently. ‘Because I’ve heard that one before, and let me tell you, it doesn’t mean what you think it does. In fact –’

‘What etchings?’ Loki asks, appearing so suddenly at Thor’s elbow that he jumps. ‘Who has etchings? What kind?’

‘This isn’t happening to me,’ Valkyrie says in a distant tone of voice. ‘It’s not. I refuse.’

Loki blinks at her and then turns to Thor.

‘What is she talking about?’ he asks, irritated. He pulls off the gloves he was wearing to feed Hela. ‘I am trying, but you know I only get about forty percent of it.’

Thor laughs.

‘And you think I understand more?’ he asks.

‘Good point,’ Loki muses. ‘Assuming you understand more than ten percent of anything going on around you at any given time would be sheer arrogance.’

‘On your part rather than mine, surely.’

‘Depends who’s doing the assuming,’ Loki tells him blithely, and reaches up to flick a non-existent piece of lint from Thor’s shoulder. Their eyes meet and hold for a long second.

‘Not me,’ Thor says in a quiet voice. ‘I learned my lesson on that score.’

‘Is that right,’ Loki says thoughtfully, his voice pitched low in answer. Thor can feel the heat of his body this close, see the wary set of his mouth.

Loki gives him a small smile, and Thor’s breath falters before he can stop it.

‘Wow,’ Valkyrie’s voice says, loud and surprisingly close to them. Thor jumps slightly. He’d forgotten she was still there. She grins at him brightly, apparently satisfied her debt of embarrassment has been repaid. ‘A lot going on here! Guess I’ll just leave you to it, then. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

‘Not the most capacious of categories,’ Loki says silkily, recovering much faster than Thor and flicking a sharp look her way. It rebounds right off Valkyrie’s good cheer: she sends a twirling wave back at them over her shoulder.

Loki looks at Thor levelly, his arms crossed over his chest.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Thor says, pointing at him. ‘She’s very small, and sneaky. It’s easy to forget she’s there.’

‘Are you _sure_ you don’t want me to get you another eye?’ Loki asks, arching an eyebrow. Thor sighs when Loki looks pointedly in the direction of Valkyrie’s exit. ‘Might not slip past you as easily.’

‘We’ve been through this, brother. _No_ ,’ Thor tells him emphatically.

‘But there are so many of them just lying around,’ Loki continues, warming to his theme. ‘People who aren’t even using them properly –’

‘What does _that_ mean?’

‘Look, I’m just saying I’m sure we could work something out.’

‘No,’ Thor says again, as firmly as he can. ‘No stealing eyes from anyone aboard the ship.’

‘Alright,’ Loki says, after a suspiciously long pause.

‘Or off the ship,’ Thor adds.

‘Oh, come on,’ Loki protests. ‘It wouldn’t be that different if we got you one from elsewhere. A quick reshaping charm and you wouldn’t even know the difference, I promise!’ He puts one finger to his mouth for a second, contemplative. ‘Although depending on the circumstances, I suppose you might experience some unusual phenomena. Seeing things that don’t exist on this material plane, something like that.’

‘Not even marginally better than seeing nothing at all,’ Thor says peaceably, which Loki rejects with a scoff.

‘You’re an idiot who’s going to die before his time,’ Loki informs him.

‘Not with you around, apparently,’ Thor says, leaning in to kiss Loki softly on the cheek before he takes his leave.

Loki’s surprised expression follows him around all afternoon, and the whole eye thing stays with him for days. It’s horribly violent, obviously! And he’s not going to take Loki up on it. But he finds himself smiling whenever he thinks about it, dopey and unaware, at what it means that Loki offered it so sincerely.

That’s what he’s doing a few days later, grinning dumbly to himself as he roots around in the ship’s reactor using his lightning. Someone taps on his shoulder midway through him trying to diagnose a degrading issue, and he turns around ready to deliver his lecture on not touching the lightning conductor in the middle of his work when he sees it’s Einarr, flushed and breathless as if he’s been running.

‘It’s ready,’ Einarr blurts out. Thor’s brow furrows, confused, before he says again, his heart in his eyes: ‘The poem we’ve been writing, your majesty. It’s ready.’

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had so much fun writing this story, and I hope you've had fun reading it! Thanks to everyone who's been so lovely in the comments so far, I hope you enjoy this last chapter <3

Thor isn’t surprised at the decorations – the twinkling, suspended lights hovering softly in mid-air, dotted all around the dining hall – but he is surprised at the sheer volume of people. They’re standing around in big groups, talking animatedly among themselves, although not divided by house as Thor might have expected.

‘Apparently everyone on board got a virtual invitation about an hour ago,’ Valkyrie tells Thor, sniffing. She’s perched on Hulk’s shoulder, idly biting her cuticles. Hulk leans against the wall with his arms crossed, scowling. Thor spots Korg and Miek a few feet away and gives them a wave. ‘It looked like a gold scroll, or something.’

‘Of course,’ Thor says hastily. ‘Gold scroll. Very pretty. Green ink, if I recall correctly.’

There’s a short pause.

‘I didn’t get one,’ Valkyrie admits.

‘Me neither,’ Thor says, grinning.

Hulk leans down obligingly so that Valkyrie can smack Thor on the shoulder.

‘NO FIGHTING,’ Hulk grumbles, settling back into place with sigh that ruffles even Thor’s short hair. ‘MANY PEOPLE HERE BUT NO FIGHTING, JUST HEAR LOKI TALK!’

‘You never know, someone might end up fighting him,’ Thor says encouragingly, then frowns. ‘Although I suppose we should hope not, considering –’

Thor cuts himself off when Loki appears out of nowhere in the middle of the hall. He’s wearing a long, complicated-looking robe in a shade of bottle green so dark it’s almost black, except when lit up by the hovering lights. Thor can’t tell at this distance whether it’s velvet or cotton but it looks soft, pliable to the touch. Loki’s hair is wound through with gold thread and swept back into a long braid that trails over his shoulder. His voice is slightly amplified when he speaks, his mouth curving in a slight smile that widens when he spots Thor in the crowd.

‘I apologise for the mysterious summons,’ he begins, his voice smooth and calm. He has his hands clasped behind his back and turns as he speaks, making sure to scan over the entire crowd. If he notices the ones who are watching him with open hostility, it doesn’t show in his face. Thor is more of the opinion that that would fuel his dramatics rather than dampen them, but he’s grateful nonetheless for Loki’s restraint.

‘I’m sure most of you are aware of the task I was given by our illustrious king,’ he continues with more than a trace of sarcasm, tempered by the way he looks at Thor when he says it, which makes something in Thor’s stomach _lurch,_ ‘to write a remembrance of Asgard’s history. So many of you have helped me that it would take me as long to list your names as it did to collect your stories. And as the finished project belongs to all of us, I thought what better way to reveal it than this?’

He spreads his hands wide, smiling into the expectant silence. Thor waits for some other statement of intent, or perhaps a reminder about how he’s their glorious saviour, but without any further ado Loki clears his throat delicately, and begins.

It’s somewhere between a poem and a song, Loki’s voice musical in its rhythmic intonation and so low and loved to Thor’s ears that he forgets, for a moment, to actually listen to the words. When he does it’s like he’s been pushed underwater, his ears and eyes and mouth filling with the landscape Loki describes in language as vivid as the pinpricks of light that hover above them. The people of Asgard listen, spellbound.

Most of Loki’s words are new but beneath the surface runs the golden thread of the poem as it used to be: Thor recognises a word here or there, a few turns of phrase, that tug directly at his heart and throw him back to a time where he listened to tales like this in cavernous halls lined with precious metals and jewels, with his father at his side, and felt so proud he could burst. But the bards’ voices melt away under the quicksilver beauty of Loki’s, and the room seems to grow bigger and lighter still as he speaks, as he lets in the past that Odin kept out of reach. He speaks of Vanaheim in its youth, lush and green with growing life, and of Jotunheim, icy cliffs so sharp they cut the breeze itself in half. Loki’s voice doesn’t falter but it does deepen as he recalls the destruction of those lands, the cutting down of their armies in the name of Asgardian conquest. Thor keeps a close watch during these verses, expecting at least a few to murmur or object, but no one does. He sees the pained recognition in his people’s eyes and realises with a jolt that they understand what it means to be made homeless: to have your nation stolen from you and broken down into something you don’t even recognise.

Loki lets them sit a moment in silence, as if to remember what they have lost. 

The final verse is one of hope, not despair. Loki rhymes of a great packhorse weighed down with sacks of grain and barrels of water, encumbered with the lives of many. It takes Thor a moment to realise that he’s speaking of the ship itself, packed to the brim with refugees, and when he does he barks out a startled laugh. Loki’s gaze breaks from its slow panorama of the room for just a second, his mouth curling around the next words as he smiles at Thor before he continues. In his description, Midgard is not a suspicious land but a generous stranger waiting to welcome weary travellers, cheerful with the prospect of offering aid. Even if Loki himself doesn’t believe that, Thor is grateful to him for giving them the lie: he doesn’t know if Earth will greet them as readily as all that, but he has to believe they’ll find something better among the stars if they’re turned away. They will find a home somewhere, if it takes them to the farthest reaches of the universe. They could do no less for the people staring at Loki now with hope and surprise in their eyes.

The knowledge sinks into Thor as deep and warm as strong drink: he and Loki have become a _them,_ somewhere along the way. _They_ will find a place for their people. Thor does not have to do this alone.  

By the end of Loki’s recitation Thor is wiping tears from his cheeks, and he spots others making the same hasty movements, sniffing into their sleeves. Valkyrie’s hands are clasping tight around the Hulk’s fingers as she smiles at him, although she remains dry-eyed. If Thor had a thousand years, he couldn’t have written what Loki has given them today. He wouldn’t even know where to start.

There’s a long moment of silence, and then someone somewhere starts slowly clapping. The applause spreads until it echoes through the hall, rebounding off the metal walls. Loki, who lives his life in constant expectation of applause for his every word and action, doesn’t look surprised and takes it in with a gracious smile and slight bow. But when he spots Thor standing to his feet, lightning crackling along his knuckles as he grins and claps, letting out a loud whoop to the amusement of the crowd, Loki looks almost painfully exposed for a second before he gets control of it. His eyes fill with something vivid and hot that Thor doesn’t know how to interpret, but whatever it is, there’s a lot of it.

Thor means to go over to Loki after the applause has abated, but a cautious crowd forms around him, people surprised into offering their thoughts and thanks. As the edges of the throng thin out, Thor spots Gilda still sitting alone. She’s hunched over on a bench rows away from almost everyone else, with a look on her face like – well, like a person who didn’t get what they wanted. Thor looks at Loki again, the glinting gold of the thread woven through his beautiful hair as he leans down to take a kiss on the cheek from Aelfhun, and sighs.

Gilda doesn’t look up when he sits down beside her. Thor examines his fingernails for a minute as if waiting for her to speak; if he acts like he has a plan here, maybe it will be less apparent that he doesn’t have a clue what to say. This sort of thing really should come with a handbook.

Gilda stays silent, if you don’t count the grinding of teeth. Thor sighs again, this time internally.

‘Whatever you have against him,’ he says, as gently as he can, ‘and whether or not Loki truly regrets the mistakes he has made, I want you to know that I believe he will not make them again.’

Gilda scoffs, not even looking up.

‘It doesn’t even matter to you, does it?’ she asks. She doesn’t sound bitter: she just sounds like she’s lost whatever fire was fuelling her. She picks restlessly at a loose thread in the knee of her trousers. ‘All the things he’s done. It’s because of him that Odin died, and Hela rose, and that my sister –’

She chokes, swallows hard, and carries on. Her voice is raw and soft.

‘She dreamed all her life of serving in the royal guard,’ she says, turning to look at Thor. Her eyes are glittering, bright with tears. ‘Your brother gave her that, a week before Hela came back and crushed them.’ She swipes a hand hard over her eyes, sniffing loudly as her mouth twitches in a bitter smile. ‘I suppose that doesn’t matter to you. I could tell you anything and you wouldn’t budge.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Thor says. He puts a hand on her shoulder and Gilda blinks at him, surprised. Thor knows his smile is strained, remembering Loki falling once, twice, dying in his arms, bleeding out, buried. The lock of Loki’s hair he’d woven into his own afterwards so they’d always be close, no matter where he went. He wouldn’t place any bets on what he’d be like if Loki had never come back, either. ‘Believe it or not, I know how it feels to lose a sibling. I’m sorry that happened to you, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’

‘But it’s over now, and none of this is going to bring her back,’ Gilda reels off, as if she’s heard it a million times before. She gives a rusty laugh when Thor raises his eyebrows, for a second looking younger than Thor has ever seen her. ‘You think you’re the only person who likes to give advice on this ship?’

‘Ah,’ Thor says, giving her a small grin. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. My circumstances are a little unusual, as I’m prone to getting my brother back every time I lose him.’

His eyes drift to where Loki stands, still talking quietly with Aelfhun, their hand resting on his arm as Loki listens with his head cocked. Leif and Einarr are seated close together nearby, comparing something across two different scrolls. The dimness of the hovering lights make every human shape in the room seem mysterious and undiscovered, shadows roaming across old and cavernous walls.

‘What’s so different about this time?’ Gilda asks him gently. ‘What makes you think you won’t lose him again?’

Thor’s breath catches in his throat, half a laugh. If he had a penny for every time he’s asked himself the same question.

‘He thinks I wouldn’t come after him,’ he hears himself say. ‘If he betrayed us again. He thinks I’d let him go.’

There’s a short silence while Gilda watches Thor watch Loki. The weight of her gaze eventually turns Thor’s head but she’s already looking away, her cheeks a little flushed.

‘By the Norns,’ she says under her breath, and then clears her throat. Her voice comes oddly formal and slow, someone feeling their way through untraversed territory. ‘Your majesty, I feel the need to apologise. If I’d known the rumours about you and the prince were actually _true_ , I never would have used them to further my own –’

‘Oh, they’re not,’ Thor says, waving a hand. Gilda cocks an eyebrow at him. ‘In the sense that, ah, while we were _sleeping_ together, we weren’t actually sleeping together. If you catch my meaning.’

Gilda blinks.

‘No, I don’t think I do,’ she says slowly.

Thor opens his mouth to try and explain again and then decides, abruptly, that he doesn’t want to. That’s been his problem, ever since they got on this blasted ship. He’s been so busy worrying about what everyone else thinks that he’s been ignoring what _he_ thinks, what he wants – what he’s wanted for so long he lacked the words to name it.

‘Then you’ll just have to wonder, won’t you,’ he says firmly. His eyes stray back to Loki again: he’s smiling and murmuring replies to some of the elders, mouth curved with that familiar edged charm Thor has always enjoyed whittling into genuine irritation. In fact, he thinks he’ll go and do that right now.

He leaves Gilda with a smile which she returns, although she still looks slightly confused. He passes Valkyrie on his way to Loki, clapping her on the shoulder. She raises an eyebrow.

‘Go get ‘em, tiger,’ he tells her. She rolls her eyes so extravagantly he’s surprised they don’t get stuck, but she can’t hide the way her cheeks flush. Thor’s grin is unrepentant.

‘Because I really need advice about my love life from you,’ she says, but her eyes have already turned back to Gilda, and there’s something shy and hopeful in them that Thor has never seen on her face before.

‘I thought you didn’t have a love life?’ Thor asks innocently.

Valkyrie swats him on the arm and walks off muttering. Gilda looks up at her approach, wary and hunched over her lap. She softens when she sees Valkyrie’s face, the line of her shoulders relaxing, and that’s all Thor sees before he turns resolutely toward Loki. Valkyrie and Gilda deserve privacy, after all: he’d be the first to admit that’s one commodity in short supply on this ship.

Loki spots Thor over the heads of what looks like Einarr and Leif’s entire families – which to be fair is only about a dozen people, but they’re a large dozen – and shoots Thor a look full of _stay there._ Thor plants himself like a tree away from the crowd, still grinning. He waves at Leif and Einarr, who only look at each other silently before turning tail and marching off somewhere, probably to go and deface the southwest bulkhead with beautifully illustrated graffiti again.

‘Come to congratulate your bard in public?’ Loki asks when the crowd finally disperses, leaving only a few stragglers. There’s a note of bitterness in his voice but his eyes are genuine enough.

‘I came to thank my brother,’ Thor says, hoping it’s not the wrong thing to say, and the flicker in Loki’s expression, though quickly hidden, says not. ‘Loki, that was …’

He trails off, holding up his hands uselessly.

‘Wonderful,’ Loki finishes for him, tapping his chin with one finger, furrowing his brow. ‘Incredible. Inspiring. One for the history books.’

‘Does that really count, if you’re the one writing them?’ Thor asks, grinning. He folds his arms across his chest tightly, conscious that physical restraint is the only thing stopping him reaching out and taking Loki by both hands, just for the pleasure of holding onto him while he’s looking at Thor like that.

‘That’s the only time it counts,’ Loki says silkily.

Thor can’t help it, he laughs loud and long. When he stops Loki is still watching him, and Thor finds he’s completely lost track of all his words. He searches for something to say that isn’t obvious or clumsy, that is as pretty and well-put as Loki deserves, but the last month has stripped everything else away until desire is all he has left, and he can’t dissemble anymore, and he can’t pretend.

‘Come back with me tonight,’ he asks, his voice low and earnest. ‘I’ve missed you in my bed, brother. Come back.’

Loki’s mouth drops open in surprise, his eyes widening. He looks Thor over as if scanning for tricks, searching for the catch in his proposal.

‘And if I don’t?’ he asks softly, even as he steps forward into Thor’s space.

‘Then I’ll leave you be,’ Thor lies, and Loki’s lips twitch, catching the falsehood. Thor gives a short, rough laugh. ‘Fine, then I’ll ask you again tomorrow, and the day after that, unless you can tell me honestly that you don’t want it –’

‘Everyone thinks _I’m_ the one who can’t take rejection,’ Loki mutters, ‘and here you are, incapable of not getting what you want –’

‘But I will, won’t I?’ Thor breathes, stepping further into Loki, until their chests brush and Loki is so close to him that Thor feels the heat of his breath. Loki’s fingertips skim along the line of Thor’s forearm and Thor shivers violently, reflexively catches Loki’s wrist in a firm grip. Loki swallows hard, his eyes dropping to Thor’s mouth. ‘Get what I want?’

The only warning he gets is the narrowing of Loki’s eyes before he twists his wrist in Thor’s grasp and clamps his fingers down hard around Thor’s arm, teeth glinting with vicious pleasure. The base of Thor’s stomach drops into the floor as the world whirls away, and he swallows a yell as Loki tugs them through the air with a savage grip, twisting the fine hairs of Thor’s arm.

They land hard and stumbling in Thor’s quarters, Loki catching his balance against the door, glaring at each other. Loki’s mouth is open with exertion, his eyes glittering with triumph, and Thor wrenches out of his grip to grasp Loki by the base of the skull and pull him into a kiss, groaning against his mouth. Loki’s mouth opens under him immediately, wet and greedy, his fingers grasping the short hairs at the back of Thor’s neck. Thor gasps into Loki’s mouth at the sharp pinprick pain of it and Loki makes a sorry, soothing noise, fingers turning stroking, his mouth going soft and pliant under Thor’s.

Something zips right down Thor’s spine at Loki making a sound like that, like he’s just _open_ to Thor, and he pushes Loki backwards until he hits the door. Loki flattens against it instantly, dragging Thor with him, hitching out a moan when Thor grinds into the cradle of his hips. Thor pulls back to gasp in some air but he can’t seem to stop darting back in to steal kisses from Loki’s mouth, already red and bee-stung from the pressure. Loki doesn’t let go of Thor’s hair, keeps tugging him back in greedily, his eyes fixed on Thor’s mouth as if there’s no other thought in his head but to get more of it.

‘We have to, have to get over to the –’ Thor says uselessly, darting down to mouth at Loki’s neck, watching dazedly as the pale skin blooms with pink marks from his teeth, his tongue. Loki pushes his hips forward into Thor needily, blinking at him from under his eyelashes in a way that Thor doesn’t think is entirely voluntary. He bites his lip as he rolls his erection against Thor’s thigh, a shiver of pleasure rippling over his face that makes Thor’s stomach lurch.

‘Fuck,’ he says blankly, pushing forward against Loki just to get him to look like that again, like he’s been hit over the back of the head with bliss. Loki gasps, his hands dropping abruptly to Thor’s ass and _pulling_ him forward until his cock is slotted perfectly into the crease of Loki’s pelvis, his thigh grinding down against Loki’s erection. They both groan, Loki leaning back against the door and encouraging Thor forward with low, soft noises, staring at Thor as if he can barely believe what’s happening.

‘You have to fuck me,’ he tells Thor out of the blue, his voice low and hoarse with need, which makes Thor’s hips falter and then halt out of sheer self-preservation. He buries his face in Loki’s neck, screwing his eye shut when Loki squeezes his ass cheeks, goading him on.

‘Come on,’ Loki breathes, running a greedy hand up the back of Thor’s shirt and flattening his palm, hot against Thor’s clammy skin. Thor shivers, thrusts against him again once, hard. Loki’s voice turns wheedling, whiny, so dizzyingly good Thor could get drunk on it. ‘Come on, brother, you know you have to, I _want_ you to –’

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ Thor says again, and wrenches himself back from Loki so he can drop to his knees, yanking at the laces on Loki’s ridiculous outfit. Loki lets out a weird, scratched moan when Thor’s fingers brush against his cock, and when Thor breaks focus to look up at him Loki’s eyes are wild, his hair half tugged out of its braid, the skin of his neck and jaw marked up with red marks, mouth open and wet, bruised.

He’s so beautiful Thor can’t move.

And then Loki makes an impatient noise, squirming around against the door and frowning down at Thor, thrusting his hips forward a little as he bites his lip, and Thor jumps. His fingers scrabble and yank at the lacing on Loki’s trousers until Loki starts jerkily pushing them down the waist and they work together until the trousers are halfway down Loki’s legs, and Thor doesn’t waste another second getting his mouth on Loki’s cock, swallowing him down in one greedy, glorious slide.

Loki gives a long, disbelieving moan, his voice going up so high at the end it makes Thor want to laugh hysterically, remembering for a brief incandescent instant that this is his brother’s cock in his mouth, that they’ve known each other since birth and yet he’s never heard Loki make a sound like that before. But then Loki gives a hesitant thrust into his mouth and every other thought flies out of Thor’s head as he groans, sucking harder, pulling at Loki’s hips, tangling one hand in the lacing of Loki’s ruined trousers so he doesn’t put a hand to himself and come before he has a chance to get inside Loki.

‘Oh, fuck, _Thor,_ ’ Loki gets out, sounding desperate. He sets a hand in Thor’s hair and thrusts forward once, shallowly, the head of his cock pushing steadily over Thor’s tongue, and when Thor tightens his hand around Loki’s hips he gives a breathy sigh and does it again, and again, using Thor’s mouth for his own pleasure. He sounds so lost that Thor can’t even think of stopping him, the mindless thrust of Loki’s cock into his mouth so absurdly perfect that it’s only when Loki’s thrusts get jerky and short that he pulls back.

‘What? No,’ Loki protests, throwing his head back against the door and squirming. His voice is so hoarse it sounds painful, scraping out of his throat.

‘Turn over,’ Thor pants, already shoving at Loki’s hips. Loki scrabbles at his hair, breathing hard, his cock jutting out achingly hard and needy. The slick tip slides against Thor’s cheek as he struggles. Thor buries his face in Loki’s groin, breathing in the spicy smell of him, his thumbs rubbing down past Loki’s cock and in between his cheeks, stroking against his entrance. Loki lets out a hard breath, cock twitching.

Thor pulls back and Loki turns this time, his movements clumsy and slow, bracing himself against the door with his head hanging down as Thor kneels behind him.

‘Fuck,’ Loki says again, apparently to himself, sounding shaky. Thor strokes his thumbs over Loki’s shivery, goosebumpy skin as he palms his cheeks apart and licks him, letting his tongue go flat over Loki’s entrance, getting it wet and messy and slick. Loki’s hands slip with a harsh sound against the metal of the door as he jerks, letting out a gasp. Thor runs his hand around Loki’s thigh and puts his hand flat over his cock, brushing a thumb over the wet tip. Loki bites off a moan as he thrusts into it, sounding almost euphoric, leaning his forehead against his braced arm. Thor draws back for a panting, aching second to tap on Loki’s thigh until Loki clumsily opens his legs wider with a gasp, muscles trembling under Thor’s hand.

Loki bites out a stream of curses as Thor licks him open, tongue darting inside until Loki’s loose enough to take two of his fingers, slick with saliva. Loki goes shivery and almost mute then, thrusting into Thor’s hand as he tightens around Thor’s fingers, half a gasp escaping before he bites down hard on his lip. Thor mouths at the crease of his ass as he fucks Loki with his fingers, half mad with it, the taste and smell and feel of him, until Loki makes a groaning, frustrated noise, his cock jerking in Thor’s too-gentle grip, and reaches behind to shove Thor off him.

‘On the bed,’ he gets out hoarsely, shoving at Thor’s shoulders. ‘Fuck, just get on the – on the bed, come _on –_ ’

‘Okay, okay,’ Thor says soothingly, running his hands over the shaking muscles of Loki’s thighs, and Loki shoots a glare at him. His mouth is so bitten red Thor gets stuck on it for a second, forgets what they’re even talking about. You couldn’t make up red like that. You couldn’t replicate it. The gold thread in Loki’s hair is spiralling in jagged shards down over his shoulders. Thor reaches out to touch it and Loki slaps him away.

‘Don’t _okay_ me, I’m not a horse,’ he spits, grabbing Thor by the wrist and pulling him over to the bed. He shoves Thor onto it and climbs down over him, kicking off his trousers on the way and straddling Thor’s thighs with a satisfied hiss. He yanks Thor’s shirt off over his head and then blinks at himself, shaking his head in disbelief before he snaps his fingers and the remnants of their clothing disappear, leaving them bare to each other. Thor’s hands land on Loki’s hips automatically and they both take in a startled, deep breath, eyes meeting. Loki rocks down against him reflexively and Thor thrusts back once, hard, hands tightening on Loki’s hips at the jolt of pleasure that goes through him. He breathes in hard through his nose, biting his lip. Loki stares at him, panting, eyes wild.

‘Thor,’ he says, his fingers running fretfully over Thor’s shoulders, ‘Thor, _please_.’

‘Loki, anything, I –’ Thor blurts out, and has to swallow every other word he knows at the look of eagerness on Loki’s face. Loki lifts up over him as Thor takes his cock in hand, giving it one, long punishing stroke. He gasps out Loki’s name and Loki mutters something mindlessly soothing, his eyes flickering to Thor’s face. He reaches out and takes Thor’s cock in his clever, beautiful fingers, moving gently and with care, and Thor knows all at once that he was a fool to ever worry Loki would be careless with him here – it seems unbelievably cruel now to have kept this from them both, to have denied that he wanted it on the basis that he was afraid Loki would hurt him. Loki loves him. Thor only has to look at him now to know that.

‘ _Oh_ yes,’ Loki breathes out, his face just smoothing out in relief as he sinks down slowly on Thor’s cock. Thor keeps a tight hold of his hips, breathing in and out carefully as he tries to adjust and keep still, but Loki has no time for adjustment – he gives a low moan as he lifts up and grinds down again on Thor’s cock. Thor grabs madly at his back, giving an involuntary groan at the tight squeeze of Loki’s body around him. Loki hisses and does it again, the muscles of his thighs tightening around Thor’s hips. Thor thrusts up again and gasps, his hands falling to the small of Loki’s back. He’s so slender there, both Thor’s hands cover the span of him: he shivers when Thor tightens his grip, trying desperately not to move, to make this last as long as possible.

‘Come on, it’s fine, you can,’ Loki coaxes, his voice gone gentle and insinuating. He grabs Thor by the face with both hands and holds his gaze while he grinds down slowly, deliberately on Thor’s cock, making Thor watch as he takes it deep.

‘You want me to?’ Thor breathes out, mostly to hear Loki say yes, and then he gets what he wanted in triplicate: Loki hisses ‘ _yes_ ,’ and grinds down hard at the same moment as Thor thrusts up. It’s so good Thor can’t stop, swearing as Loki tightens around his cock. Loki makes this incredible sound, almost petulant with pleasure, his hand snapping back to his own cock. He jerks himself hard and fast while Thor watches, fucking Loki in quick, short strokes and yanking him in to kiss hard until Loki starts squirming, circling his hips on Thor’s cock, his gasps rising in pitch as Thor tangles their hands together on his cock.

‘Not yet, not yet,’ Thor gets out, stilling his hips with a truly gargantuan effort. Loki makes a protesting noise, bites down hard enough on Thor’s lip that he winces even as the pain shoots straight down and makes his stomach lurch, getting confused with pleasure somewhere along the way. ‘Turn over, come on –’

‘What, again?’ Loki gripes, voice gone completely thready now, but he lifts himself up and off Thor so fast he can’t have been that adverse to the idea. He crawls behind Thor on the bed and starts to position himself on his hands and knees, but Thor pulls him back by the hips before he can catch his balance, cock slipping thick and urgent between his cheeks, and Loki lands hard on his elbows, yelping. Thor murmurs something nonsensically soothing and runs an apologetic hand over Loki’s back and under to stroke at his cock again, grinning at how Loki’s curses instantly turn from indignant to pleasure-struck. Loki arches his back into a steep, devastating angle, spreading his knees wider across the bed and making a noise that tightens Thor’s throat until he can hardly breathe. He holds Loki firmly by the hips as he pushes his cock back inside, heart thumping at the way Loki squirms underneath him, his breath coming hot and fast as he pushes his face into the sheets.

‘Yes,’ Loki gasps, shoving back as Thor thrusts forward until he’s letting out sharp cries with every slam of Thor’s hips against his ass, the muscles in his legs shaking with the force of it. ‘Yes, _yes,_ don’t stop, I’m –’

‘Fuck,’ Thor breathes out as Loki’s back ripples, something powerful shuddering through him. ‘Loki, come for me, let me feel you –’

‘Thor,’ Loki pants, desperate, getting a hand under himself and groaning loud and long, his muscles clenching hard around Thor as he comes, back arching steeply. Thor’s cock jolts deep inside him once, twice more, hips stuttering out of rhythm as white hot pleasure starts to build, and then his hands tighten around Loki’s hips in shock as bright blue sparks _leap_ from the tips of his fingers, arcing out across Loki’s skin and skittering across the bedframe, lightning gushing to the surface of his skin and spilling outwards, out and out and _up_ –

Loki gives a shout, whole body bucking underneath Thor as the shock passes over him. Thor falls forward and buries himself inside Loki as he comes with a long, groaning cry, Loki arching and gasping beneath him, his white-knuckled fingers tearing a ragged hole in the sheets.

They lie in a panting heap for a long moment before Loki makes a bewildered moaning noise into the pillow.

‘Fuck,’ Thor says dimly, panic trying to swim its way through the fog of orgasm, ‘fuck, fuck, I’m sorry, are you okay, did you –’

‘What the fuck was _that_ ,’ Loki mumbles, sounding like he’s been hit with a brick. ‘I didn’t know you could do that, why didn’t you tell me you could do that? I want you to do that _all the time._ ’

‘ _I_ didn’t know I could do that!’ Thor protests. He runs his hands anxiously over Loki’s chest, his thighs, trying to soothe an ache he can’t pinpoint. ‘You’re the first person I’ve – since I got the lightning, I didn’t know, I –’

Loki wriggles sluggishly under Thor then shivers with oversensitivity, catting back against Thor’s chest. Thor wraps his arms around him automatically, hugging Loki to him hard and firm. Loki makes a deeply satisfied noise.

‘Well, now you do,’ he says sleepily. ‘Big win for the lightning powers, if you ask me.’

‘You aren’t hurt?’ Thor checks, his pounding heart finally starting to slow.

‘Really the opposite of that,’ Loki yawns, patting Thor’s hand and shivering when Thor nuzzles at the base of his neck. ‘Now stop worrying, I’m –’

The lights flicker.

‘Oh dear,’ says Loki, sounding more amused than disturbed. ‘I think you broke it.’

‘I didn’t break it,’ Thor protests. ‘I’m sure it’s just –’

The room goes dark.

‘Er,’ Thor says, even as Loki is already shaking weakly with laughter underneath him. He turns his face sideways on the pillow so he can attempt to draw breath, laugh and mock Thor all at the same time.

‘I never want to forget this moment,’ he says dreamily. He spreads his limbs across the mattress in a jerky stretch, shivering deliciously with a stray aftershock when Thor’s hand strokes through the mess of come on his stomach. A flare of heat goes through Thor and he sets his teeth lightly to the back of Loki’s neck, stroking along the shivery underside of Loki’s thigh up to where they’re still joined. Loki draws in an unsteady breath.

‘Nor should you, it’s your fault,’ Thor tells him. Parts of his body that aren’t his cock start filtering sensations back to him sluggishly: it’s too hot with them pressed together like this, Thor’s throat so dry he’s nearly croaking. They’re so sweaty he expects Loki to start protesting any moment but he doesn’t, just stays quiet under Thor, his breath evening out contentedly when Thor’s touch turns calming, his hands running gently over Loki’s sides.

‘I wasn’t the one shooting lightning into the metal walls of a spaceship rather than the mattress,’ Loki says eventually around a huge yawn. He reaches back to scrunch up a hand in Thor’s hair; Thor drops a kiss onto the wing of Loki’s shoulder blade.

‘I was distracted,’ Thor mumbles, already halfway to sleep. ‘I’d like to have seen you follow a train of thought under the circumstances.’

‘I was following one,’ Loki argues sleepily. ‘It was a very specific one. I’m a very goal-oriented person, I’ll have you know.’

‘Oh, I’m aware of that,’ Thor says, grabbing Loki around the waist and hefting him up and onto his side so they can spoon, grinning at Loki’s indignant protests and slapping hands.

They both freeze at the knock on the door.

‘Is everything alright in there? We’ve had reports of a power outage.’

‘Oh my God,’ Loki says in a high-pitched voice, clearly on the verge of crying with laughter, before Thor shoves a hand over his mouth.

‘It’s fine, thank you,’ he calls out, trying to inject carefree nonchalance into his voice rather than the abject desire to vent himself into outer space. ‘Just had, er. Had a bit of a moment. I was practicing, you see. With my er, lightning powers.’

Loki bites down hard on his hand and Thor yelps.

‘Right,’ comes the voice after a moment, sounding doubtful. ‘Well, it should be back on any minute now, your majesty. No need for concern.’

‘Good,’ Thor calls back, his voice strained. ‘Thanks! All fine! No need to worry.’

‘As you were, your majesty.’

Thor keeps his hand over Loki’s mouth until he hears the footsteps recede.

‘Practicing with your lightning powers?’ Loki imitates, nipping at his fingertips as Thor pulls away. He wriggles back against Thor pointedly, yawning again. ‘Is that what we’re calling it now?’

‘It was a form of practice,’ Thor says quietly, wrapping his arms tight around Loki. ‘It is new to me, you know.’

‘Not that new,’ Loki mumbles, his breathing starting to even out.

The lights still haven’t come back on when they fall sleep.

\---

They’re on in the morning, though, and fiercely bright when Thor opens his eyes muzzily to find Heimdall standing over his bed with a slightly pained expression, his hands laced behind his back.

‘Your majesty, I apologise for waking you so early but an urgent matter requires your attention,’ he says calmly, keeping his eyes very resolutely on the intricately carved metal headboard and not on the way Loki’s head is resting on Thor’s shoulder. ‘It seems that Leif and Einarr have taken rather too well to each other in the wake of your manipulations, and are now refusing to go back to their separate families unless we allocate them their own room.’

‘Um,’ says Thor, as Loki stirs awake under his arm. He uncurls like a cat in the sun, eyes still closed as he stretches, shudders flowing along his arms and making the hair rise across the back of Thor’s neck. Then his eyes open and keep opening, widening comically at the sight of Heimdall.

‘Er,’ he says.

‘That’s what I said!’ says Thor.

Loki shoots him a look of such irritation that Thor is vaguely surprised he doesn’t immediately burst into flames.

‘You couldn’t have waited outside?’ Thor asks Heimdall in a more disgruntled tone than perhaps he should. After all, he is simply performing his duties. It’s only – Loki has gone flat-eyed where he was soft and pliable in sleep, and a pink flush is spreading across his collarbones, which he is surreptitiously trying to cover with the mussed blankets. The moment they hit puberty Loki had started changing behind a screen even when the rest of them were stripping off and whooping their way into the baths, splashing at each other. He’d lacked the soldier’s carelessness with his body that came so naturally to Thor, never getting the hang of nakedness in the company of friends he wasn’t trying to fuck. ‘You couldn’t wait outside _now_?’

‘I have been knocking on the door for ten minutes,’ Heimdall says mildly, his gaze momentarily dropping to Thor before lifting again. ‘I didn’t think it would do much good to try for another five.’

‘Yes, yes, alright,’ Thor says hastily. ‘You don’t need to go on about it, I’m up now. Well, I will be. If you, er.’

He shuts his mouth with a snap, not sure how to end the sentence. Loki rolls his eyes and waves an irritated hand at Heimdall.

‘Go on, I’ll make sure he stays up.’

‘I’m not a child,’ Thor protests, but Heimdall only nods imperiously at Loki and takes his leave.

Thor thumps back onto the pillow and groans. Not about the Leif and Einarr thing – because let’s face it, everyone on board except their parents had seen _that_ coming a mile away – but at the fact of being awake and expected to get out of a bed that has a naked Loki in it.

‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘if there was anyone left on the ship who didn’t believe we’re sleeping together, they will now.’

‘Do you think so?’ Loki says sceptically. ‘I doubt Heimdall’s going to tell anyone, he isn’t exactly the gossiping type. I’m not entirely sure he knows how. It’s a terrible waste of omniscience, when you think about it.’

‘A good quality in a king’s advisor, though,’ Thor remarks, and Loki makes an assenting noise that somehow also manages to convey a sense of boredom at Heimdall’s cast iron reliability. ‘But no matter – it’s all a wash anyway, you’ll be seen leaving. If not now, then tomorrow, or the day after. At some point, one of us will forget and make a mistake. And after we went to all that effort to make you seem vaguely respectable.’

Loki arches an eyebrow.

‘Who went to all that effort, again?’ he demands, poking Thor in the side. Thor grumbles a little, leans into Loki’s neck and digs his teeth in, just a little. Loki shivers hard and lets out a carefully controlled breath, his hand coming up to hold Thor’s head in place.

‘You weren’t this bothered the first time someone saw me leaving.’

‘Yes, but we weren’t actually doing anything then!’

Loki pulls back and stares at him.

‘If you honestly believe that, you’re even more stupid than I thought you were.’

Thor opens his mouth and then closes it again, feeling the heat of a blush spreading across his cheeks.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Loki smirks slightly before it fades. He looks down at the gap of inches between their hands, resting on top of the blankets. ‘I could disguise myself whenever I leave,’ he suggests. ‘They’ll think you’ve moved on to bedding some lucky noblewoman and won’t give it another thought. Heimdall won’t tell a soul, even if it disgusts him.’ He gives a very thin smile. ‘I can keep my mouth shut if you can.’

Thor frowns. Loki’s voice is calm and thoughtful but his hands are bunching up the sheets. _Could_ , he said. He _could_ disguise himself, he _can_ keep his mouth shut, neither of which implies that he actually wants to. Loki is capable of many things, and is very good at convincing himself that they’re all his idea even when it hurts, but Thor doesn’t want hiding this to be one of those things.

‘Seeing everything doesn’t automatically mean you understand it all,’ he says. Loki raises his head cautiously, watching him with wary eyes. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to assume Heimdall judges us, but even if he did, it wouldn’t stop me wanting this, and it wouldn’t make me feel ashamed.’ He hesitates. ‘And really, I don’t see why we should hide from the rest of the people now they’ve been reassured of your loyalty. There’s no need for that now, you’ll be safe either way.’ He smiles at the look on Loki’s face. ‘Besides, I’ve been told I’m rather obvious in my affections, so it would probably only take them until lunchtime to notice anyway.’  

Loki just stares at him for a moment.

‘I hate it when you do that,’ he says in a small voice.

‘Almost as much as you love it,’ Thor agrees, and Loki’s eyes narrow.

‘Oh, you think you’re so clever,’ he says. His limbs seem charged with glittering quicksilver energy as he pushes Thor slowly onto his back and kneels over him, trailing his fingertips down Thor’s chest while Thor gasps. ‘Speaking to me so sweetly, expecting me to thank you for giving me something that’s always been mine. You think you can just –’

‘But I _can_ just,’ Thor interrupts, smoothing his hands down and back up the arch of Loki’s back, taking a handful of his hair and tugging it just so, to see Loki’s lip curl, the heat flaring in his eyes. ‘And I _am_ going to speak to you sweetly, because you’re my brother and my love, and you’re going to let me.’

‘Am I?’ Loki asks, trying so hard to be dubious even as he leans down, even as he grins despite himself, fierce and joyful.

‘Yes,’ Thor says firmly, and again when Loki arches an eyebrow, and again through his own laughter as Loki kisses him, again he says yes, yes, yes.

 

**Author's Note:**

> All comments and kudos are appreciated! I'm on tumblr under the same handle, come and yell about Ragnarok with me


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